Bugs!

Kade loves bugs. He says they are so cute.  He tries to give grasshoppers hugs when he sees them on the fence.  He spent all summer chasing grasshoppers through the yard. He wasn't quite brave enough to pick up the big ones. He would bend down and get his fingers close enough that all he would have to do is pick it up but he was too scared. He would try to get me to pick it up for him. That's never going to happen. The only one who would pick them up for him was his Grandma Atkinson. One day she picked one up for him and broke it's leg. He was depressed about it for a month. He would be playing and out of the blue he would say, "Grandma broke the grasshoppers leg mom." I told him that she fixed it but he was still distraught over it. At the end of the summer he finally got brave enough to hold a little one. He carried it all around the house in his bug jar and he kept getting it out to hold it. It of course would jump out of his hands and I would have to search the floor to find it and use the jar to scoop it back in.

We have a plant by our front door where a praying mantis lives.  She lived there all summer and every time we watered the plant she would come crawling out.  Kade calls it a potanis.  Sometimes we would put her in his bug jar and bring her in the house for the day and then put her to bed in the plant at night.

 

 

Kade's Aunt Ruth has a flower bed that has snails in it.  We have brought a few home and watched them for days.  We found out that they like to eat tomatoes.  I left one a tomato to eat his breakfast and an hour later I remembered he was out and ran in the kitchen to find that he was gone.  I was looking everywhere, it's a snail how far could it go?  Finally I found him.  He had finished eating and crawled back into his jar of leaves.  What a good pet.

Kade only has patience when it comes to catching butterflies.  He will stand perfectly still by my flowers and wait for them to land.  He tries so hard and one day he finally caught one.  He had to bring it in the house and give it a train ride.  He rubbed the dust off the wings from holding it so much so it couldn't fly anymore.  It rode on his train and in his cars and went in the bug jar and crawled around the table.  He had the best afternoon with that butterfly.