Reign of Terror

Last night the back door was open. By now we should have learned our lesson (remember this?). No woodland creatures this time though. Just your everyday COMPLETELY HORRIFYING MOSQUITO EATER. At least thats what the kids thought. The kids have this really complicated love/hate/fascinated/horrified relationship with all things bugs. Most bugs don't bother them. Rolly-pollys, ladybugs, ants, butterflys don't bother them a bit. But when you get to spiders, dragonflys, flys and bees...it gets complicated. Almost every time we go to the library we come home with a book on spiders. Parker can tell you the difference between a bird eating tarantula and a brown recluse. In fact Parker has an imaginary friend who is a tarantula. She puts her hand out and makes it crawl around and thats Tarantula. Sometimes I'll ask her if she wants a snack and she'll answer, "No. Tawantula wants a snack." She'll run her hand up my arm and put a finger to my lips and make a kissing sound, "Tawantula give you a kiss." But the second she sees a spider web she screams. And not a little surprised "AHH!" Oh no, this is a blood curdling, horror film girl running in the forest scream that lasts anywhere from thirty seconds to over a minute. Complete with arms tensed and shaking. She did the same thing yesterday when she went down the slide and realized there was a GNAT next to her. Every single person at the park was staring at us as she hysterically screamed "A BEE! AAAAAAAAA BBBEEEEEEEE!!!!" You would have thought the gnat took off with one of her limbs. When I finally got her attention long enough to say, "Its just a fly Parker!!" it was like someone turned a switch and she immediately stopped and said, "Oh? A fwy? Okay." and got back on the slide. *sigh*

So last night Parker and I were in the kitchen and she spys the mosquito eater flying around. At first she was excited and said, "Oh a dwagonfwy! A dwagonfwy!" So then Fin runs in the kitchen saying, "I wanna see it! Where is it..AHHHHH DATS NOT A DWAGONFWY!! I DON'T WIKE IT!! AHHHHHHHHHHH!" And now I have two children completely hysterical clutching each other for dear life screaming at the top of their lungs. NOTHING I did could calm them down. In the meantime the bug had moved on, so now I don't know where it is. With it out of sight they finally calm down, but they are still whimpering and Fin keeps saying, "Mommy I just don't wike dat thing." and then Parker would start crying again. Then as soon as Parker would stop crying Fin would bring it up again, starting the cycle all over. I finally had to say, "Griffin! STOP talking about it! Its all gone, its over, lets move on!" And turned on Animal Planet. That bought me about fifteen minutes of quiet till IT appeared again. This time Josh was home and got to witness the madness. With him home, we both couldn't stop ourselves from laughing. It was just too absurd. So he's running around trying to kill the dang thing, and I have two kids clutching me and crying, and both of us are trying as hard as we can not to laugh out loud. And of course the bug got away. So we head upstairs for bedtime, the kids still whimpering. Fin walks into the bathroom and immediately runs out screaming "ITS IN THERE!! ITS IN THERE!!" Which of course sets off the Parker horror film scream. Josh runs in the bathroom to kill it, but there's nothing there. It takes me a good ten minutes to convince them to go in the bathroom and brush their teeth. They are still talking about it when we put their pjs on. They are still talking about it when we tuck them in. They are still talking about when we're picking out books to read. Till Josh finally had it. "Alright! Listen! I'm going downstairs and I'm going to KILL it, okay?! And then we're DONE. DONE." The kids were hushed till he came back upstairs a few minutes later with a newspaper in his hands. "I killed it. Its dead. Do you want to see it?" They both shake their heads no frantically. "Alright then, lets read some books."

Our hero.