Sleep Tight- Don't Let the Bed Bugs Bite

It all began over a month ago when I started to get weird itchy bumps on my hands.  They were so odd- I couldn't remember getting a mosquito or fire ant bite, and no one else had them  They itched like mad! A few weeks later Chris got some too.  At first they were only on our hands, then our arms, then our feet.
I noticed they were really bad in the morning, so I washed our sheets- but that didn't help. 
It all came together when a friend from our complex came over on Tuesday the 21st.  She explained how they had bed bugs and their place was being sprayed so she needed a place to hang out for a few hours. She started describing how they found out it was bed bugs...I felt a huge knot form in my stomach as she perfectly described what was happening to us.  Sure enough Chris went up to look and once we knew what to look for, and where, he saw ton.  He called me up and when I saw them covering our bed skirt I literally almost threw up.  We immediately started cleaning per our friend's instructions.

Thankfully Chris was on vacation and was home to help clean.  Our biggest problem was that we were leaving for vacation on the 24th, so we had a couple short days to get our apartment ready for inspection and extermination/spraying.  If we didn't have our place completely ready before we left it would 3 weeks before the pest control people would do anything.
Here's what we had to do:
Wash and Dry (on the highest heat settings possible) every single piece of fabric in our house. All of our clothes, towels, drapes, my purses...everything.  We definitely ruined some clothes that couldn't take the heat- and a lot of our clothes shrunk too.
Take all clean laundry and immediately seal it up in plastic bags.
Remove everything from the walls- this includes light fixtures and outlet covers.
Vacuum every inch of carpet 
Move everything to the center of every room
Pull up the carpet and vacuum underneath the carpet
Vacuum every sing inch of the mattresses and box spring
Vacuum very carefully anything with upholstery and flip it upside down.
dry clean what could be cleaned and throw away everything else

the living room

the master bedroom

the kid's room

the dining room

I can't think of what else we did. It is all a blur. On top of this we had to be completely pack to leave for our week and a half long vacation to Virginia. Thankfully we finished right on time. I pulled the last load out of the dryer, bagged it, and we rushed to the airport. It was a crazy couple of days.  The whole time we were at my parent's house I was terrified we had brought the bed bugs with us.  So far it seems like we didn't...

They were supposed to do our first spray the 28th, and spray again on Tuesday, but we found out yesterday they hadn't come for the 2nd time so they came today instead. When we walked in the door last night at 10:30 after our flight we were welcomed to our house in shambles- no idea where the sheets were, no pillow (we threw those out)...and shear craziness.  On top of that, Chris opened up Abby's pack n' play (she's sleeping downstairs now with us -there's no way I'm touching our mattress  until we get a special bag from Orkin that we have to leave on it for a year...) and found a bug on  it...wahoo.  So I'm still terrified even though the Orkin man couldn't find any today.

This has pretty much been the worst experience of our lives, and that's really no exaggeration.  I thought bed bugs only happened to dirty gross people, but the pest control man told me they can happen to anyone- and that they're on the rise here in Houston.

Let's just say we are super excited to move...4 months, 3 weeks, and  days till our contract expires!