Bugs

We pulled a special babysitting day with just Zoey last Friday.  The kids had been taking the girls up to Seattle every morning the past week.  Mackenzie was involved in a gymnastics camp at U-Dub (that’s University of Washington) and she needed to be up there by 8:30 am everyday.  They had to leave the house by 7:00 am and didn’t get back until after 6:00 pm.  By Thursday evening Zoey was tired of the whole thing and begged to stay home with Grandma and Papa.  OK, we said yes.

Bruce and I still wanted to get our exercise done Friday morning, and we we set the alarm for 5:00 am and were out the door for a 1-hour walk before 5:20.   Zoey arrived on our doorstep at 6:50.   The morning went well and after showers and all of that stuff, we went off to McDonald’s for breakfast.   It is easy to take one of the girls with us and still be able to have our breakfast and enjoy reading the newspaper, but we’ve given up on taking the both of them.  All sorts of pandemonium seems to break out and things get spilled and there is NO paper reading with them around.  One is do-able, two is not.

Zoey decided it was too boring at our house and wanted us to go to her house for the rest of the day.  Fine by me since there are way more things there to keep a 5 1/2 year old busy!  Zoey and I jumped on the trampoline for a long time.  Actually, it is quite fun and more exercise for me too.

We got tired of that and then I remembered the Bug Keepers I’d bought the girls at the Dollar Store last month.  I asked Zoey if she wanted to go bug hunting and she eagerly agreed.  We took her keeper out in the front yard and began to search for some bugs. 

                                             We peeked under the flower bed bricks to see if we could find anything crawly.  

We found one tiny little spider, but I wasn’t really interested in catching a spider of any kind.  We kept looking under more of the bricks. 

Where are the bugs these days?  We never saw a roly-poly bug or a caterpillar or anything.  I remember when I was a kid we could always find bugs outdoors.  We had a lantana shrub and it was always filled with these little butterfly or moth type things on the yellow flowers.  We could always catch a few of those if we wanted. 

                                            We even looked up in the leaves to see if anything was hiding there.  Nope.
Zoey wasn’t one to give up easily, so we kept searching.  She filled her little Bug Keeper with some fresh leaves and a few twigs and dandelions just in case we finally found something.  And Grandma kept turning over the bricks to see if we could possibly find anything at all.

We gave up looking in this area and went over to the flower bed near the front of the house.  Stephanie had planted some small annual flowers and we looked around there.  Finally!!!  We found something.  There was a small grasshopper sitting on one of the leaves there.  I put the opening of the keeper over him and he hopped inside.  Quickly I closed the little door and he was trapped.

                                            Here’s the little feller now.  Look way in the back of the keeper.
It was a good day with Zoey.  Mackenzie got home and was all excited about completing her week of camp at the university.  Starting tomorrow morning, our vacation is over and we are back on the fulltime babysitting job.  Monday thru Friday until the end of August.  On September 7th we head for Pismo Beach, California….alone!

At church this morning, the pastor gave a sermon based on the 23rd Psalm.  In part, it reads:

“The Lord is my shepherd,

I shall not be in want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures,

He leads me beside quiet waters,

He restores my soul.” 

After the service Bruce was talking to a friend and the guy asked when we were leaving again.  Bruce told him we’d be leaving on September 7th.  The guy asked where we were going and Bruce said, “we are going to go and find those green pastures and quiet waters so our souls can be restored.”  Bruce also told him we wanted to spend September and October listening to nothing but the sound of the ocean and the wind blowing ashore off the Pacific.  The guy shook his head knowingly and smiled.

Until next time…..so long for now!