our first tick

I was running my fingers through Max's now quite long hair on Sunday afternoon and felt what I at first thought was a scab or something. But as I parted his hair to look, I found that what I felt had legs! Ick! It was a rather large tick very firmly embedded in his head. Of course I panicked and called my friend kara for instructions, and then upon finding that our tweezers had disappeared into the vortex in our house, went next door to borrow tweezers from our neighbors. They offered a little more advice, which was to try dripping soap on the tick and holding a soapy cotton swab on it until the tick backs out. But that didn't work too well, and we ended up with the tweezers. That little bugger was really hard to pull off, and I'm afraid we ended up removing some of Max's skin, as well, but the tick came out whole, with no remnants left in the skin, so that was a good thing. We saved that tick, just in case of infection. YOu're supposed to be able to test the creature later in case of sickness to see if it had Lyme disease or whatever. Max was very brave, no tears, and so far no sign of infection. We felt like this was another part of our initiation to the culture of the Missouri hills.