Caterpillars

In L's school there is an abundance of caterpillars. Despite screaming in fear of bugs for most of her life, she has seem to have become quite taken with these creatures. She is so captured by them that I have to pat her down after school to make sure that they are not hidden in her pockets. Of course my genius daughter instead hid them in a bottle in her backpack. She had been smuggling them home for a few days when I found her emptying one of these bottles into an old popcorn tin that she had hidden under her bed.

She believes that there were 15 caterpillars in the bin. In truth she had no idea. When they escaped she would pick them up and put them back in the container. Apparently she recaptured them every day when she got back from school. Here I was happy that she was actually playing in her room with her toys. I had L gather up all the caterpillars and we walked to a nearby park to give them a new home on a nice bush. L has a horrible time with transitions and saying good by. She was in tears but handled it pretty well. One way L copes with transitions is by having me take lots of pictures, so she has them to go back to. Ironically she very rarely asks to look at her pictures. This picture is of a special caterpillar that she was originally under the impression that she got to keep.

When we returned home L was amazed to find that we did not take all the caterpillars to the park. She found one on her bedroom floor *big sigh*. I told her that there was no way I was walking back to the park for one caterpillar. It was dark, it was past bedtime, and I was exhausted. I suggested this one caterpillar get placed in the bushes of our apartment. This is when L finally broke down. She fell down distraught and cried (real tears, not the fake kind) but he is just a baby. You can't kill him, he is just a baby."

The problem with my solution is that the bushes outside our house are covered in poison to kill the snails. I have had to continually tell this to my children since J especially randomly picks up items and puts them in his mouth. So, L knew that putting him outside our place was a death sentence. I did what any tired mother who has flashes of caterpillars crawling all over her during the night. I relented, pulled down our old fish tank and let her keep just the one caterpillar - on the condition that no more were brought into my house. Have I mentioned that we are not allowed to have pets - any type of pets. We can not even have one bata fish. CRAZY! So they also had to hide the tank so it was not visible from the front door.

Unfortunately the poor little caterpillar did not make it more then a week, despite the improvements to his home, the research that L and myself conducted, and the daily trips to get him new food. I think our apartment is in habitable. Every plant or caterpillar we have tried to inhabit our place has perished. At times I worry about my own family waisting away in this place. However, a residence with actual grass, and outside space, a real kitchen, and could I even suggest three bedrooms, costs way more then I bring in even not taking into account things like food.