…but are these your dead rollie-pollies in the living room??

Aiden is having a love affair with bugs. If he could, that child would spend all his time lifting the paver rocks from around our basement window wells to pick out rollie-pollies. He keeps some of them in a little bug “house” that Logan got for his birthday. Sometimes, he brings all his magna-tiles outside and builds complex living arrangements for his new pets. Sadly, they don’t last long and I keep having to dispose of his little friends…only to find him digging for new ones just hours later. Once in a while, the bug homes make it into MY home..specifically into the living room. I don’t mind much. It’s not like he’s catching spiders. Mostly the poor little creatures stay put until…again, I take them to the trash the next morning. We are having some landscaping done this summer which includes digging beds up to the window wells (which means no more paver stones under which rollie-pollies can be found). When Brian broke the news to Aiden just this morning, his little face settled into such a look of utter sadness that we instantly promised to build new places in the yard for hunting.

These are the two window wells in our backyard. The stones used to outline the covers…but this is prime bug-hunting ground so, of course, they had to go!

I’m not sure what happened to the flowers beside this one…something about Aiden and Ryan thinking they saw something fly in there. I guess they decided to “look” for it (aka: destroy the plant).

Unrelated story: Brady, Aiden and I were in Target the other day. When we walked out, right there in the middle of the parking lot, there was a mama duck waddling along with 7 baby ducks. It was so stinkin cute. Brady tried to get close, but mama didn’t like that much. She spread her wings and quacked at him. I got them in the car and pulled up alongside their little parade to take a picture with my phone. Brady held my phone the whole way home looking at the picture exclaiming, “duck!! duckies!!” When the phone would automatically go dark and shut off, he would complain, “no! duckies gone!” until I fixed it for him again.

Now how can I get my kids to follow me this closely while I walk around???