The Roach

I meant to share this with you ages ago, but somehow life got the better of me and it ended up in the 'can't manage that just now' heap.  So here we are.  A while back, Munchkin and I did a bit of gardening.  Read: I tried to garden, and he wandered here and there around the yard seeing what interesting things he could find.  He loves holding things in his hands.  We invariably have to ask him to drop the stones, stick, or seedpod when we get home.  He is generally very accommodating of such requests (thankfully) and (mostly) past the age of putting every single thing he picks up into his mouth.

This gardening episode was enlivened.  Literally.  He found a roach.  It rued the day it ever met Munchkin.  I did try, again and again, (repeatedly, over and over and over!) to tell him to be gentle.  I removed the roach from his fingers and popped in into a seed raising pottle.  Nope, not good enough.  It had to be in his hand, squished between two small fingers, while one very happy boy inspected it's wiggling body.  Poor cockroach.  Happy Munchkin.  And to be completely honest with you, it was a sacrifice I was willing to make.  I got some veges planted uninterrupted (between rescuing the roach several times and finally hiding it out of reach of prying little fingers!). 

Now some of you might be feeling a bit grossed out about letting a young child handle a roach.  But the advertisements you see selling fly spray or disinfectant on TV are blatantly misleading.  Roaches are not dirty animals at all.  They are (apparently) quite clean.  They do a really good job tidying up after us.  They just look a bit, I don't know, dirty.  But one really should admire their resilience (I think it was roaches that they reckon are the only living animal which can survive a nuclear blast - they were used for promos leading up to Y2K at any rate!).  Anyway, I figured it probably wouldn't hurt the Munchy Baby, and it is a real life (literally!) experience for him and one which he absolutely loved.  He has since chased several roaches around the house.  Along with flies, spiders, and just this afternoon a small wasp (which Daddy discretely dispatched while Mummy distracted Munchy elsewhere!).

So there you go.  Bet you never knew that cockroaches were such good value, did you?!

Amy