Of all of us, Dash is the most delicious to mosquitoes.

I used to be right up there beside him in that achievement, but an amazing thing has happened this summer: I’m no longer beset by bites. And it’s – apparently, according to some light reading I did on the Internet – because I’m not nursing any more. I could swear I always got bitten before I had kids too; but on the other hand I’ve been pregnant or lactating solidly for the past eight summers, so maybe my memory before then is just too fuzzy. I mean, we didn’t live in the swamp that is the DC suburbs eight years ago either, so I have no local comparison. Anyway, this wonderfully unanticipated upshot of finally weaning the giant babies (which happened last November , if you weren’t paying attention) is that I only have a few stray itchies here and there instead of the 40 or so my legs were sporting this time last year.

So now it’s mostly just Dash who suffers. Mabel only gets one or two, and B generally repels them effectively with his dashing manliness. (Or possibly his unique combination of permanent hirsuteness and frequent sweatiness.) And Dash, poor bunny, hates mosquitoes. One of his first two-word combinations was “eviw addito”, parrotting me as I slapped one of the little feckers off my darling child’s alabaster forehead. (I said “evil mosquito”, if you haven’t worked that out.)

Last year we tried out a couple of the natural bug sprays, because DEET scares me and because he doesn’t have a bath every night so I don’t want something that has to be washed off. They didn’t work, but Dash decided he could probably make his own just as well. (Well, since they didn’t work, I suppose he was right.) I’m a bit vague on the science he claimed was behind it, but it involved scraping some bark into some water and crumbling up some leaves and adding them, and then spraying the resulting concoction (or is that a decoction? I know there’s a difference) on himself.

This year he decided to make his bug spray again. He got me to buy a spray bottle, which I did, because hey, anything to have him gainfully occupied outdoors, right? (I use the term loosely.) And then he filled it with his special formula and has been assiduously putting it on himself. He still has mosquito bites, and there’s a can of DEET (yes, I caved) beside the door, but he’s convinced that his way is the one true way.

I don’t want to wait for him to get West Nile Virus before I burst his bubble and force the hard stuff on him. But he’s surprisingly resistant to any sort of scientific experiment to determine exactly how well his spray is working. Because you can never know how many bites you might have got if you hadn’t used it, you know?