Mites, Schmites

Just thinking about them makes me cringe. I happen to catch a segment on Rachel Ray the other day regarding dust mites. The woman on there was talking about what you can do to prevent mites entering your pillows and mattresses. First off, she said you should only have a mattress for 5-7 years before it is deemed unhealthy in the mite department. For pillows, she said 2-3 years. She even weighed a new pillow at 3 lbs, then weighed the same kind of pillow, 3 years old and it weighed 3.8 lbs. 8 ounces of DUST MITE POOP! Vomit right now please.

Now, I have heard of these dust mites in the past. I have even had a terrible run in with bird mites. I'll have to save that for another post, but can we say they were on our phone (in our LA duplex), then got into our hair! Double vomit. Double shower. Anywho, I knew about mites. I have even vacuumed our old mattress before thinking it would actually make any mite that may have been in there disappear. Have you ever lifted a mattress and come to find the thing weighs A WHOLE HELL OF A LOT and it hadn't at purchase?? Well, it just might be the secret poop deposits inside your mattress.

Since moving to our house, we have been able to upgrade to a new bed. Woo hoo! What do you think we did with the old bed? Yep, moved it into our guest room. What, you don't ever want to come and stay at our house? The pillows are brand new, so don't freak out too much. I have no hard evidence that anything resides in there, but I can only imagine. Actually, I did a thorough check of our mattress back in LA when I was attacked by baby spiders on a nightly bases while sleeping. Did they ever venture over to hubby's side and bite his ass? Nope, just me, all of me. I ended up wearing bugs spray to bed to keep them at bay. Once again, another post. Point is, I was on the floor checking out every area or outlet those freakin spiders could have come from. So, I am quite familiar with the underside of our bed.

After watching this segment on mites I thought about how many times I washed my sheets, that I should be washing them on HOT in order to kill anything that happened to be clinging to them. I am usually a WARM washer doing my part to save the earth, but EWWWW! I also thought about how many times I washed my pillows. Um, can we say NEVER? Why haven't I EVER washed my pillows??? Down comforter, check, decorative bed pillow cases, check, good grief, NEVER! So, I spent all day yesterday washing my goose down pillows in COLD (label instructions) It was a disaster. The pillows retained so much water from the washer, it took me forever to squeeze the water out. Then, they took forever to dry. I have had to run the dryer twice TODAY just to get the wet feather smell out. Ugh!

Hopefully in the future I will have better luck at keeping things around here mite free. I should just purchase some dust mite covers and call it a day.

One great tip I did learn from all of this is to add two tennis balls to the dryer while drying your pillows. You are supposed to have fluffier pillows as a result! However, I wouldn't know this. Rt was by my side while drying the pillows, so the demand for the tennis balls won out.

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