Sentiment#1 New Life

A heartwarming sentimental story about procreation fell on my lap the other day.

As soon as March rolled in new life started sprouting up all over the place.

Sammie's preschool is a co-op or parent-child workshop or job #2. All parents work there at least once a week. The jobs rotate every four weeks from art patio to upper yard to quiet area to blocks. The only job I like there is kitchen duty. After you bring all the other parents coffee or tea, you frantically start chopping fruit and vegetables for over an hour and then serve it all on trays for snack time. Child interaction is minimal and Sammie is really proud of the fact that I make the snacks. I traded a friend for sandbox duty so I could get back in the kitchen for the next few weeks. I hate sand, but I love coffee.

Sammie occasionally swings by as I am hacking up grapefruit or kumquats to request grapes or carrots. Usually, she just ignores me.

The other day however, she came up and said she found a bug in a bucket. She was so excited. I asked what kind. A beetle? An ant? A ladybug? A moth? No, no, no and no. It had antennae was all she could tell me, so I gave her a paper bag and told her to go get the bug. She asked if she could keep it and I said, "sure" and carefully arranged cashews on the platter.

Sammie came back with a couple curious friends following her and showed me the bug. It was a little brown slug. I told her how cute it was, the head of the place took her to the science area to get her a better container. I gave her left over peels from the compost bag. We took the slug home and Anna rolled her eyes.

After a day or two, the peels started getting ripe so I dumped them out, Sammie found a rock for "Olivia" and I put a bunch of oatmeal at the bottom. We put the home in front of the fireplace and let Olivia hang out in her own mess for days.

The other day, Anna informed us that there was a lot of mold in the slug cage so Sammie and I stepped outside to clean it out. As I reached in with a plastic fork to scrape out soggy oats, some itsy-bitsy transparent bubbles hiding under a LOT of fuzzy stinky mold caught a beam of light and started to glow.

I congratulated Sammie on her soon to be new babies. Soon, if all went better than our pet oak worm scene, Olivia would be a mother many times over. Cute cuddly little slug babies slurping all around, getting their antennae poked in, eating old peels. Sammie was super excited and kept asking to see the eggs over and over. I'm not sure she could see them.

We reassembled the slug nest and put it back in front of the fireplace.

At the dinner table Sammie told Anna all about the slug eggs. I told her how they had been laid in a dark place under a warm patch of mold. Anna stopped us mid-sentence and announced she was going to puke. For a second, she really looked like she would.