Queen E has been learning in Kindy about consideration for other living things, the consequences of and being aware of their actions… Following one of her friends bringing in a large burrowing beetle, the kids then had the added option of contributing to the setting up of a beetle habitat, digging up the earth in a designated corner of their outdoor play area and finding (never plucking) leaves, while being reminded not to disturb the immediately adjacent areas that house plant beds and pots. That was how it all started…
One evening we’re walking JD on the beach and lo and behold, a big fuzzy caterpillar is crawling along the open expanse of sand.
Like, where that boy is walking.
Queen E excitedly brings it to school, to the response, “…a great provocation for the children to inquire into…”
Earnest Serious Face for this picture haha
Queen E’s is not normally such a serious personality (she’s a cheeky monkey at home), so we were quite impressed at how seriously she took this. “Great provocations” – never thought of it that way before – another small step to nurturing a young inquiring mind. She knows it’s a caterpillar. Yet caterpillars don’t belong in the middle of a sandy beach. How did it get there? She came back from school that day saying they had tried to note down the identifying characteristics (horns, markings). The thing was already in a cocoon that morning.)
Because sometimes life throws a big fuzzy caterpillar our way.
When we find One Big Hairy crawling along in the sand, we can:
1) Scream and run the other way. (Lots of people do this)
2) Scream at the dog not to eat it. (I’d do this)
3) Squish it for fun, just because you can. (You don’t do this, do you? The caterpillar’s journey stops there. But so does yours, ever think about that? Because within your selfish of-the-moment gratification of being the squish-er, you have forever snuffed out your own chance to see what emerges from the cocoon), or
4) Put Hairy Opportunity In A Plastic Cup and try your hardest to nudge it into a butterfly/ moth (I later justified to Queen E nabbing it despite having no idea how to care for it (what does it eat?? Nothing nearby looked like what a caterpillar might eat and there were no other cocoons, caterpillars, or butterflies in sight, it’s actually quite cold now) by observing it was probably in trouble anyway, if it was in the middle of the wide expanse of sand.)
I fervently believe you should never be more “cruel” than you absolutely have to be, to other living things on this earth (in the sense that you have to eat something living, be it plants or animals. And you have to smack mosquitos, because they might give you something. But you do not have to salt snails), they are there for a reason and some kind of “greater good,” even if we have no idea why they exist. (I said something like this long ago and a reader commented that being mean to other humans often starts with the capacity to be cruel to animals)
I have a similar (imperfect) argument for say, the difference between loading up on vitamin supplements and eating as many of the foods in their natural form as possible – decades ago, there were only maybe 6 “discovered” vitamins. Nowadays there are…. 20? Wait a few more decades there’s going to be….. 50? Thing is, you cannot artificially manufacture a vitamin that you don’t know exists. So, taking the supplements instead of the natural foods means you’re not getting the potential vitamins that pharmaceutical companies don’t know to manufacture yet. (I like to look in Bumps to Babes and other supermarkets for squeezies with more exotic fruits/veggies mixed in them – squeezies cost a lot more than the regular fruit or veggies, so then squeezies should “work harder” with the exotic veggies.. Of course then I have extra work making sure the kids really eat the whole thing at home :P)
“Goji” appears to be the “gei-jee” we use in chinese soups…
(Other fruits have higher sugar content and when you snack on them in dried form they actually stick to the teeth more than this one)
On a further aside, around this time Queen E somehow revisited Charlotte’s Web that we’d looked at ages ago, about the spider who spells words on her web (might have started from the spelling because she came home from school one day and asked “what were those words that spider spells?” and so I went to dig it up) to save her friend the piglet from being eaten. It’s also a story about a little girl who refuses to give up on saving the runt of the litter – even if it means winning a livestock competition against all odds.
This is Charlotte (pic from wingclips.com)
Actress Julia Roberts, who voices Charlotte, once said that after making the movie she couldn’t kill spiders as readily as she used to.
That’s the piglet she’s trying to save (pic from target.com)
I liked that Charlotte looks like a real spider (though Rockstar complained that the spider blinks and narrows its eyes in the movie). Also, Charlotte dies at the end of the movie, having lived out the natural life cycle and span of a spider. She does not marry a prince and get whisked off to a castle happily ever after, to be waited on hand and foot by palace maids and drivers and butlers and what-not <snort>. She drinks fly juice (having pointed out to the other farm animals that she does not have her meals brought to her), spins webs, secures her giant egg sac…
One of my favourite scenes is when the farmhands think a spelling spider is miraculous, and are told that the web-weaving spider is already a true miracle – “You know how to knit a doily because someone taught you… No one teaches a spider how to weave a web. Don’t you think that’s a miracle?”
How many miracles can you find with new eyes this week? 🙂
