Kid Tracks: Kid Tracks Column: Skin-crawling drama at the river

A biking trip to a favorite swimming hole was more eventful than I was prepared for as the lone adult with four kids in tow. The swimming part wasn't the problem. It was the run-in with leeches I could have done without.

The day started with a bike ride to the Saco River with my girls and two of their friends. It was a warm day so the plan was to swim once we got there.

Finding a place to park the bikes once we got to the river required a bit of maneuvering over some rocks and a walk on a trail through the woods but we found a nice spot for a dip in the river.

The girls decided once they were in the water that they wanted to swim to a little island just off the shore. It was about 50 yards away from the sandbar they were standing on and as close as it seemed, I wasn't sure if any of the girls would find the distance too tiring.

But I agreed after much pleading on their part that they could go with one condition. They had to swim with me two at a time since they didn't have any noodles or floats (no room on the bikes for that gear). I took my 10-year-old and her 9-year-old friend first. The girls swam the distance without a problem and climbed up on the island's rock with smiles on their faces. But as I turned back to get the other two girls, my 10-year-old started screaming.

"mommy, Mommy, MOMmy, MOOOOOMMY!!"

I asked her what was wrong and her friend said, "Oh gosh ... you got leeches."

So my 10-year-old did what a lot of kids would do. She started swiping at her skin, jumping around and screaming about getting them off.

I climbed up on the rock to check things out and her hysteria grew. I had to tell her to stay still so I could take a look and confirmed (silently) that yes, she had a bunch of tiny, squirming leeches attached to her.

I thought (again, silently), "Oooh, yuck-a-doo, but I'm the mommy so I canNOT freak out."

I tried to get a couple of leeches off with my fingernails but it wasn't working very well (probably the one and only time in my life I wished I had long nails). I told her we had to get back to shore where my first aid kit was.

As far as my 10-year-old was concerned, getting back in that river was unthinkable.

Yeah, I wasn't so keen on that either (I had several leeches on my own feet that I couldn't deal with at the time) but we had no choice.

So I sent my 9-year-old friend out first and asked my 12-year-old, who I knew was a solid swimmer, to meet and guide her back to shore while I carried my 10-year-old back into the water.

Once I got back to shore, which required me to swim while carrying a hysterical child, I had my hands full with her as well as the other three girls. The whole crew was jumping around in a building panic trying to figure out if they had leeches on their bodies too.

Then my 9-year-old friend exclaimed to my 10-year-old, "You have some on your back too!"

That made my her jump and swipe at her back even more enthusiastically while screaming "get them off, Off, OFF!"

I snapped at the other girls to check each other for leeches and pointed to a spot about 20 feet away where I wanted them to do that. I was trying to calm down the still hysterical child and did not want any help from the peanut gallery (although I did feel badly I was short with them and apologized later).

I sifted through my backpack looking for my first aid kit only to find that someone had removed it. (As of today, that "someone" in my family has yet to fess up.)

So I grabbed a plastic card from my wallet in hopes that I could scrape the leeches off. But the card was too thick and did not bend enough to fit between my 10-year-old's little toes (she had several leeches between each one). So after testing a handful of cards, I found my expired BJ's card had the most flexibility and worked best.

Now when I say that this kid had little leeches all over, I'm not exaggerating. The tiny suckers with their wiggling tales were all over her feet, legs and back. A conservative guess would be around 40, although I think there were more than that.

The worst clusters of the suckers were on her healing cuts, which is why I think they were attracted to her in the first place. The day before she had sliced her leg and a large cluster of leeches were camped out in that area so that's where I started my removal work. But as I scraped the little suckers off, her cut really opened up and blood started flowing down her leg, which got the other leeches wiggling their tails more enthusiastically. I wasn't sure if that meant they were digging in or not but it's not a sight I will forget anytime soon.

As I scraped, I explained to her and the other girls that leeches have been used for medicinal purposes for hundreds of years. As you can imagine, the girls thought that bit of history would have been more interesting if they were not in the midst of a hands-on learning experience.

My 10-year-old's feet became full of sand during the removal process and she would not consider putting her feet back in the water to rinse off so I could see if I missed anything.

Oh no, there was no more walking anywhere near that water again.
So I called it quits for her and took a moment to scrape the little suckers off my own foot and the one my 11-year-old friend found on her back. The other two girls were completely clear (and I noted that neither of them had an open cut on their bodies either).

My 10-year-old had calmed down enough at that point to ask to go home. That's when we all realized that we had a bike ride ahead of us to get there.

The girls put on their clothes, shoes and bike helmets amidst their skin-crawling shutters. We made tracks away from the river (and over the rocks and through the woods) in record time. Although no one was interested in stopping for a water break on the way back, my 10-year-old did stop and pick up a dead butterfly she spotted on the side of the road. I took that as a good sign she wasn't fearful of all of nature's creatures.

I got my 10-year-old in the shower once we were home and tried to put salt between her toes to get rid of the remaining leeches there. The salt didn't seem to work (it probably would have but I think it just wasn't working fast enough for her) so I went back to scraping them off with the card.

Unfortunately, we found a missed leech in a particularly sensitive private area and since it had been attached for a while, it was full of blood and not easy to scrap off in that tender spot. She of course was mortified and then upset about the bleeding that happened after that leech was removed.

Later that night while we were snuggling on the couch, my daughter started experiencing the skin crawling feeling and asked me to check her body for leeches.
There weren't any left.

She woke up several times that night with dreams about "creepy crawling stuff" and had a hard time getting back to sleep.

The next day I asked her if she thought the leeches were worse than the time we were swarmed by yellow jackets (everyone in the family was stung multiple times and it was quite scary for all of us).

"No, the bees were worse."

OK, so there is hope we might go swimming again this summer.

But next time we're going to the lake.