And Then They Hatched

If you read my post a few days ago, and managed to stick with it to #7 on the list, you know that we have a little jar with holes in it. And if you had peered into the jar with wonder you would have seen little tiny orange eggs stuck to the underside of a spring leaf. That was Monday.

Well, yesterday I woke up and the orange eggs were gone. They were replaced with little tiny black bumps. At first I thought the black was mold, kinda like the stuff you see growing on rotten tomatoes. (If you have ever watched the Magic School Bus you would know that microbes cause food to rot. In the MSB episode on microbes, those little rotters - pun intended - caused a perfectly good cucumber to turn into a perfectly good pickle. I have grown to love microbes. They are a good answer for many, many questions that kids ask, like "How come we have to clean the table?" Microbes, I answer. "How come our compost is steaming?" Microbes, again. You should try it sometime.)

Anyways, I thought that we had killed the entire lot of mini eggs. BUT, upon closer peering, I realized that the eggs had hatched into some type of little teeny, tiny black bug with legs. What a great thing it is for a six-year-old to become a parent to a brood of bugs.

To add even further interest to this story, when we woke up this morning, the black bumps had disappeared and were replaced with what actually looked like lily-white broken egg shells.

The world is a wondrous place. Something orange makes something black and then something white. No artificial colouring or spray-paint involved even.

But, where did the bugs go? I opened the hole-punched lid and peeked in. Nothing.

Oh, there you are little buggy. The sneaky little things had found their way between the lid and the jar and were just waiting for us to unleash them. They were now crawling down the outside of the glass like they were escaping for their lives, which I guess they were.

We put the jar and the lid outside, carefully.

My younger son went out alone to say good-bye to his new family that he was losing so quickly.

"I will never see them again," he said with his head hung and his longish bangs covering his eyes.

I know that the answer to this one is not microbes.

"That's right sweetie, you won't see them again. That is sad, I know."