How do you get blood out of the carpet?

I got to bed around 10pm last night and at 7am Chicklet came running in to snuggle. That would be great except that she doesn't actually snuggle. She has hug-ADD I think because she always wants a hug and then after a millisecond she is squirming away again. So to keep her still and quiet until baby brother wakes up I get her a sippy of milk. On my sleepily staggering way to the kitchen in the semi-dark of 7am, I stepped on something we 'round these parts like to call goatheads. Also known as puncture vine, these little devils are a seed shaped roughly like the head of a goat/sheep/cow. It had two long straight sharp needle-like thorns coming out of it making it look like the goats horns. Except that the rest of the seed is covered in shorter sharp spines as well. To step on one is to know pain. And then you have to pull it back out of your foot which hurts all over again. Not to mention your fingers get stabbed as you pull it if you're not careful. The spines I have seen have been up to half an inch long. Just the spines on the seed. The seed itself can be as big as a pea only more triangular-oblong shaped. They're not usually quite that big, but it's not exactly RARE to find a behemoth sized one in your foot. Or your flat bike tire. Yes, these little monsters can flatten a bike tire easy as pie. Just go ahead and Google "Goat Head Thorn" and you'll see what I mean. The devil's own weed, I'm tellin' ya! And they come in on my cat's mile-long fur. There's a doggie door in the laundry room which for our current purposes is actually a kitty-door. So this morning as I'm staggering along to the kitchen in the near-dark, the soft tender underside of my toe knuckle gets a piercing. I almost let out a scream. YEEEEOOWWW! It sure hurt! Then I noticed it was uncommonly difficult to pull out; must have gone in pretty deep. I tripped into the bathroom, dropped the thorn in the soap dish (without turning on the light) for later inspection, and went to get Chicklet and take her to the bathroom to pee. Then I got her sippy and lay in bed with her for the whole 30 seconds it took her to drain 9 ounces of milk. We wound up once again in the living room with her playing and me laying on the couch wondering why I'm still feeling run-over-by-a-train tired until Bug woke up.

I proceeded to answer myself, "Self, you are still tired because you are not a morning person. You never have been and you never will be. You can try and try all you want, but if after 3 years of waking up before 8am you still can't function before noon no matter how early you go to bed the previous night, you are just not cut out to be a morning person and never will be! Give up the charade!" So now you know my dirty little secret. Or one of them anyway. I am not a morning person. I think somewhere in the unwritten rulebook of homeschooling it says that to be a good homeschooling mommy you must be a morning person. At least that's the impression I get everywhere I go. So I'll keep on trying but so far... not working. Hey there's evening classes for college, why can't there be evening homeschool? Lol!

But I'm sure you're sitting there wondering what this all has to do with blood in the carpet... I'm getting there! I'm getting there! You're so impatient!

Fast forward to this afternoon. I am playing with the kids on the living room floor and the party moves toward the hallway. From my viewpoint laying on the floor with Chicklet in my face giggling and Bug climbing on my back, I notice a smear of reddish brown dried into the beige carpet. I squinted at it but couldn't figure out what it was. Figured whatever it was it didn't look or smell like poop so I'd get it out when the kids took a nap. Fast forward to an hour later when I put the kids down for a nap and finally got the first chance to use the bathroom since I woke up this morning. I'm sitting there and I notice these little dried blood squish marks all over the floor. I look closer. Yep, blood toe prints. And where my feet were as I sat on the stepstool waiting for Chicklet to pee that morning was a larger dripped on dried blood mark. Niice. So I pulled up my foot to look and the underside of my toe has a nice big hole in it courtesy of that devil thorn. *Sigh* Now I know what the smudge is in the hallway carpet. It's right where I would have put my foot back down after removing the thorn. I think PineSol will take the stain out. I hope. I checked out the thorn in the soapdish too and it's a whopper. It's one of the biggest I've ever seen. It's the biggest I can ever remember having had the misfortune to step on. And it's still got my blood on it. Gory evil thing. I'm gonna save it and show my husband. I should frame it. :p I'm kidding I'm kidding! We don't frame things that have injured us in this house. Just things like potholders and crochet hooks. But that's a story for another time...