A recent fashion find from Grandma. Seeing how I don’t have the ego to put it on my child, it found a direct path to the Goodwill pile. As it peeks out at me from the top of my second-hand stash, I wonder if any teen fashion retailer carries the exact same shirt. If so, I’d pay full price and hold onto it until 2026. Big night planned? Want money? Need to take the car? Put on your uniform.
This week came the moment we were waiting for: the hatching of the praying mantises.
Doug purchased an egg case containing about three hundred of these formidable creatures, who happen to be our state insect. As soon as the temperature rises, tiny cricket-like bodies emerge from the egg case. It is important to release the hungry baby mantises moments after they hatch, lest they soon begin eating each other. It is sibling rivalry at its finest.
We released them in our garden, where they will spend their lives camouflaged in leaves and braches, patiently stalking their prey. Praying mantises snatch their victims with vice-like, powerful forelegs and crush them in half. Their triangular, alien-like heads rotate 180 degrees, and they can see fifty feet away. Their love stories never have a happy ending—the female mantises devour the males alive immediately after mating, and sometimes during. Somehow, it doesn’t put a damper on the mood.
Nope. I don’t believe we’ll be adding the swinging bench to the garden this year.
Sometimes our children tell us early on who they are destined to become. Kids who take their toys apart and put them back together again are quite possibly our future engineers. Those who take care of wounded cats’ prey and other ailing wildlife may wind up nurses. Our kids who create elaborate buildings out of Legos just might become our next generation of architects.
Today I rounded the corner of our living room and found Eva, stripped down to nothing, clothes strewn all over the room, wildly spinning to the theme of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I love to dance naked!” she shrieked, now jumping so ecstatically she nearly knocked over the coffee table.
And with that, her membership at the local chapter of the Future Doctors of America, class of 2034, comes to a grinding halt.