a good weekend, millipede and all

This was a buggy weekend.

Saturday afternoon I worked on the back yard clearing debris, putting in two miniature rosebushes and prepping for annuals.

The whole time--a couple of hours--Sam puttered outside in the back yard, which was a perfect antidote to the wild mood swings of the ferocious fours.

Have you heard of this? The FFs are least as bad as the Terrible Twos. Sam's teacher, Ms. Mulvaney, says that kids generally go through a very rebellious phase around 4 yrs old, lasting less than a year. Describes Sam to a tee. He'll be fine one day (or all last week, as it turns out), then the next he'll be fighting us at every turn. Sunday morning he was writhing on the floor howling in protest at our cruel attempts to feed and clothe him. Poor guy.

Apparently a real problem with the FF's is that when the child enters this phase and starts acting like a maniac, the parents are loathe to mention it to other parents, for fear theirs is the only child with early-onset insanity. So the parents suffer in solitude, at least until someone tips them off. So when we are in a group of other kids Sam's age--as we were at the birthday party on Sunday--we are always very happy to see the other kids showing the same behavior as Sam.

Back to Saturday, you can see Sam with a little bug container he got in the bug collection kit given him by a friend at work. (My work, not his.) There's a potato bug in there. And in a similar little container which actually has a bug-sized maze, he had a centipede crawling around. Foreshadowing of bugs to come, as it turns out. Sam also wandered around with a magnifying glass I gave him. Besides actually looking at things, he pried the 3" lens out and used it to slice dandelions.

Sunday Sam went to a birthday party at the zoo. About 20 other kids [*] were there for it. It was Zoo-hosted, so it was in a conference room. They had pizza and cake and made a "craft" (putting colored sand in a plastic necklace thingy) and crayoned the paper tablecloths--but the real highlight was the staff worker who showed them a ball python, a hedgehog and a millipede. We learned some new things: Millipedes eat decaying vegetable matter, as opposed to centipedes, which eat other bugs. So whereas centipedes are venomous, millipedes are poisonous--i.e., only dangerous if you eat them. And while centipedes move quickly, the better to catch bugs, millipedes, which only have to stalk stalks, move slowly.

They are still disgusting.

Shown in the photo is Sam sitting next to Alicia, another FF, even then contemplating wickedness.

On the way back from the Zoo Sam also let us know that magic is different from miracles, and why. He had learned about the feeding of the 5,000 that morning (complete with goldfish crackers--which, being a bread-like product, conveniently play the role of both the loaves and the fishes), and the excellent Mrs. Cok, his teacher, had managed to clear up that distinction for him. He also noted happily that both words begin with M.

In Children In Worship (where he goes during the worship service, after the children's sermon) Sam learned from Mrs. Smith a fun game which he was very eager to play the rest of the day: Tisket, Tasket, Who's in Paul's Basket. In this game one person covers his or her eyes while another is chosen to hide in the basket, covered by a blanket, with only feet sticking out. The first person then has to guess, based on footwear, who the person in the basket it. We don't think it teaches anything theological, unless you somehow tie it to Ruth's uncovering of Boaz's feet, a connection Sam's a little young for.

The game does prefigure all the fun we hope Sam will have in the world to come (which Susan did the children's sermon on Sunday). And it made for a very good time Sunday evening.

[*] 20 kids at the birthday party = ~$300 worth of gifts.