The Caterpillar and the Watermelon

The other day, Harper was walking to the slide when she spontaneously imploded, complete with screaming that I imagine would accompany a jellyfish sting or something equally painful.  I went to investigate and upon arrival at her location, realized she wasn't stung by anything at all.  She wasn't even hurt!  She had been frightened when she stepped on a small little caterpillar!!!  It took a few minutes for my heart rate to return to normal.  The thing is, Girlfriend can (and frequently does) scare and terrorize kids three times her age, and here she is in a panic attack over a fuzzy little caterpillar.  Fabulous.

So we had a long chat about small animals in the garden, completed by observing the caterpillar and other insects and bugs.  Em loved it since she's studying life cycles at school and they're currently raising silk worms.  She's been begging to bring some home but I keep telling her that Mommy has a hard enough time remembering to keep the humans in this house alive without adding some animal to the chaos.  (She doesn't like that answer)

Last night, we ate dinner outside and as we were cleaning up, I spotted this little guy.  Rather than let Harper freak out on me again, I pointed it out to the kiddos.  All three proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes inching along in-step with the caterpillar.  Em decided it was a girl and tried to name "her" amongst adamant protests from Cooper that it was a boy.  Then someone remembered that caterpillars eat leaves.  Thank you Eric Carle for your informative book.

That meant Todd and I had a battle on our hands to keep our trees and bushes from getting stripped bare.  Harper decided that since the caterpillar didn't seem interested at all in the leaves, she'd share her watermelon rind.  And when the caterpillar didn't seem to like that, she decided to beat the poor thing into submission.  At that point, interventions occurred on behalf of the bug and I vaguely remember hearing Todd mutter something to the effect of, "I'm not paying for counseling of that thing.  HE wandered into our yard, complete with OUR kids so he knew what he was getting into!"  Never a dull moment around here :)

At some point, feeding the new "pet" became boring and Coop and Harp realized that if they put their hands close, but didn't touch, they could actually 'steer' the caterpillar where they wanted it to go.  Early manipulation skills.  Awesome.  Another reason why we can't have animals in this house :)