Posted By AmyD. on November 9, 2009

She spent the summer capturing butterflies and keeping them in a mason jar. Some life preserving soul in the house had the good sense to cut slits in the top and encourage her to place a few zinnias in the jar as well. Thank goodness. Late at night I would creep downstairs and like a Schindler’s List version of Santa Claus I would release the butterflies into the night.

(Circle of life and all that crap, right Chickie? And why isn’t THAT on a t-shirt?)

I have an “issue” about killing things. I mean, cockroaches and flies don’t count, obviously. When I was 5 my grandparents took me to Oklahoma City to visit relatives. I spent hours upon hours with my “distant” cousins catching grasshoppers and pulling off their “hoppy legs” so they couldn’t get away so easily. Oy, the guilt.

Years later I find myself flinching when Mike flicks a grasshopper into an easy bird lunch in my flower bed. I can’t bring myself to kill any insect beyond a fly or a cockroach. Truth be told, my Margaret can’t kill anything beyond a fly. She claims to hate cockroaches but I’m not even sure she’s seen one. She is now the proud owner of an African Emperor Scorpion and is completely enamored with something that makes me cringe every time I see it!

My youngest is nothing like my other two children. She’s a true wild child with the heart of a fairy or wood sprite maybe. To me she’s Tinker Bell in child form, both for her temper and obnoxiousness.

I walked into the bathroom to find her happily smearing toothpaste on the outside of the water closet door. This was just a few months ago! Being the worry wart that I am I began to worry if she was developmentally challenged or if something was wrong with her. She looked up and saw me and put her finger to her lips. Then she motioned me away from the bathroom and she whispered, “This is the greatest joke… EVER.”

That’s when it dawned on me that her father was in the water closet and somehow she was pretty sure when he came out he would close the door by holding the outside knob that had been carefully and thoroughly coated with toothpaste.

She’s not dumb, she just likes to live on the edge. This is as close as a five year old can get to bungee jumping.

Five years old… in less than two months my baby will be six. This strange and brilliant child who just months ago was capturing butterflies is now writing her name, knows every continent on the planet, and also knows who Henri Matisse is.

She infuriates me regularly with her stubborn refusals to learn her letters. She told me that she likes X, Z and M because Maggie starts with M. But the rest of the letters are “boring” and so she refers to all of them (even if she KNOWS them) as P, R or Q.

She knows them, she understands them, she recites them dutifully, but she would rather you ram bamboo shoots under her fingernails than ask her “what letter is this?” or suggest a run through her flash cards.

Math, shapes, science, or history are all far more welcome than those dreaded flash cards.

Very unlike her brother and sister who pretty much loved every aspect of learning and dove into just about everything like little sponges ready to soak it all in.

Maggie is a selective learner. I think she has convinced herself there is limited amount of space in her brain and she’s going to be choosy about what she takes it up with.

Still, there isn’t a day that goes by when she doesn’t make someone laugh… usually pretty hard. And, as the saying goes, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, then it’s hilarious.

…Which might explain that scorpion fascination.

Categories: Things That Could Get Me Killed
Tags: butterflies, butterfly, Kids, Maggie, mom, Mom Stuff, pets, scorpion