Dirt Bumbles!!!!

While we were home-schooling, I had a lot of great ideas.  Some of them worked, and when they did, there was nothing more fabulous!  The girls would get all excited and enthusiastic about the project and I would feel like such a great mom and teacher.  But then sometimes my ideas flopped, and there would be rolled eyes and listless participation, and I would feel like something less than a total success.

When you are a home-schooling mom, you do tend to get all tied up in whatever your kids are doing.  You start to find that your own personal sense of self-worth gets tangled up in your children’s success and enthusiasm.  It’s very weird and probably not that healthy.  Or maybe that was just me.

Anyway, one of the ideas that I had was to start a journal of all of the bugs and animals that we saw as we went about our days.  The girls were forever bringing me bugs and worms and feathers to identify, and I thought it would be really cool if we kept some sort of record of their finds.  I bought a nice big art journal with clean creamy pages for the entries.  I sat the girls down and explained that we would identify the creatures as we found them, print out a picture from the internet and paste it into the journal.  We would then write a few sentences identifying the animal and explaining where and when we had seen it.

Fun, right?  And educational, too!  I guess it was too transparently educational, because the girls reacted as though I was giving them a new chore: the animal journal chore.  So I wrote in the first few, hoping to spark some excitement . . . a swallowtail butterfly, a ladybug, a blue jay.  But the girls couldn’t be bothered.  They would point to a bird or a bug or an animal and say, “Put that in the journal, okay, Mom?”

I still thought it was a good idea, so I offered them a reward.  Ten cents for each of them for every animal they journaled.  That worked for about a day and a half, and then the bickering started over which of them was doing the most work and who was taking advantage of whom.  And even when they weren’t arguing, I grew testy at the fact that I had now agreed to pay them for something I thought they would want to do.  So the journal was put away.

It was only taken out one other time that I can recall, and that was when Kallan really really needed a dollar for something or other.  I wouldn’t give her a dollar, so she took the journal and went around the house, journaling all of the bugs that she found in our house.  That’s right, in our house.  Turns out we had house-flies, silverfish, ants, a dead beetle, rolie polies, and a surprising assortment of spiders.  Kallan got her dollar, and I spent the next two hours cleaning the house.  So that was a good day.

Up here in Lake Oswego, the girls have been finding all sorts of new critters and bugs. So when I found the journal in a box of school papers the other day, I thought about suggesting that we make use of it to keep track of the Oregon creatures they have spotted.  Instead, I laid it on the table next to the back door, thinking maybe the girls would find it and take it upon themselves to add to its pages.  Instead, they raced right by it into the back yard this morning, a neighborhood friend in tow, on their way to dig a huge hole in the back corner of the yard.

Note to the landlord: No landscaping was disturbed in the digging of the hole, and it will eventually be filled back in.  However, if the girls have their way, it won’t be filled in until they make it a bit deeper, cover it with leaves, and then trick one of the neighbor boys into falling into their trap.  However, since the worst that could happen at this moment is the twisted ankle of a really stupid boy, their dreams are likely to go unrealized.

As they dug their hole, the three girls came happily racing and screaming to the back door with their finds:  giant earthworms, a black beetle, huge slugs, and weird naked caterpillars which might possibly have been grubs of some sort.  The journal sat at the back door table every time they reappeared with cupped muddy hands to show me something.  I figured it was only a matter of time before they made the connection.

And then they came screaming to the door one final time, shrieking about “dirt bumbles.”  I don’t know where it came from, but there was indeed a slow-moving bumble bee on Kallan’s shoulder, looking as though it had been too-early awakened from whatever nap bumblebees take in the rainy Oregon winters.  I swept it from Kallan’s shoulder, but the three girls were still in a panic about the “swarm” that they were certain was about to descend upon them.  I wouldn’t let them in until they had removed their unbelievably muddy shoes, and they watched anxiously as the slowly crawling bee lumbered on the deck around their feet.

Maj reached past me into the house and grabbed the journal.

Finally!

But then there came a rapid WHAM WHAM WHAM as Maj smashed the bee into oblivion with the journal, its creamy pages flapping as she pounded again and again . . . WHAM . . .WHAM . . . . . . . . . . . . and one final WHAM. And then the three delighted sock-footed girls raced past me on their way to the board-game cupboard.

Leaving me with three pairs of horribly muddy shoes, smashed bee remnants, and a bee-guts and filth-covered journal which I guess I should start filling in for myself.

Sigh.