We Should Have Named Him Carl...

Peanut is obsessed with bugs.

I guess most boys go through this phase? I don't know. I'm just sort of confounded at the depth of his interest.

I mean, he catches them. Constantly. I don't even know how he does it, because his untuned fine motor skills don't seem like they should make it possible. I can't catch flies with my bare hands, but he just reaches out to the tiny buzzing thing on the window screen and nabs it by its wings. Then he brings it to me.

"Look, mama," he announces, with jubilant importance. "A fly!" He holds it out, expectant. "Here."

"Um..." I hesitate, trying not to burst his bubble with my disgust. Would a daughter have brought me flowers instead? The tiny legs twitch in midair. "Wow, sweetie, what a neat fly. Why don't you let him go outside so he'll be happy?"

"Ok," he chirps, trotting out the back door. He releases the fly but then seems upset that it flies away, perhaps expecting it to hover around him gratefully. "Where fly go? Where he go?"

"He must have gone home to his family," I assure him, in my best let's-instill-empathy-for-other-creatures mode. "Flies are happy when they can fly around. They don't like being caught."

"Where fly go?" he repeats, ignoring me. I give up the compassion lesson. "Why don't you look for an ant instead?"

One of his favorite books is a sort of smorgasbord of all things small, winged, and multi-legged, a picture-hunt of different ecosystems where each image contains hundreds of various bugs, like some Indiana Jones nightmare. In the margins, smaller individual pictures of the bugs you are supposed to find are accompanied by their names and a factoid or two. He likes the exotic ones, pointing them out and shouting out their tongue-twisting names: "Giraffe-necked weevil! Hercules beetle! Processionary moth caterpillar!"

This from the kid who still can't get his colors right consistently. It's too bad we aren't teaching him the Latin names - we could make a youtube video of him rattling them off and be famous.

I try to be all Montessori about it - you know, follow the child. So we read books about bugs, and watch videos, and I feign excitement about them and have given up warning him that if he catches wasps and bees they will sting him. He's found that out the hard way, and is undeterred.

"Wasp will STING me," he informs me gravely. And picks it up.

"Ants will BITE me." Jabbing at the ant pile.

Maybe an ant farm is in order. Then again, maybe not.