Excuses, Excuses

Ok, Ok, so I'm a tease. I had you pumped up, didn't I? Only to let you down. I felt your disappointment screaming at me. The guilt has eaten me alive. Therefore, I'm staying up a bit late, despite my exhaustion, to make it up to you. My hope is that you'll forgive me for not posting yesterday as promised. In my defense, I had forgotten about my RCIA meeting last night. Since not going would have meant disappointing God as opposed to you guys, I erred on the side of eternal salvation and went to my meeting.

Forgive me.

And you'll probably be further disappointed since there will be no pics of the kids in this one. Except for this:


But this post isn't about the kid...it's about what you see on the wall behind the kid.

A Cicada.

This is what a Cicada looks like:




But let me start at the beginning. When picking Grace up from school a couple of days ago, I saw these:


And like any easily wigged-out American living in an area where lots of things creepy crawly can actually kill you, I asked the teacher about them.

It turns out they are holes where, each year here in Central Australia, Cicadas come out of the ground to do their thing.

"Their thing" includes shedding some God-awful ugly shell, drying out and mating. Only to have their eggs containing future generation, somehow end back up in the ground.

But this isn't a lesson in the life cycle of Cicadas. Truthfully I'm not very interested in the who, what, when, where and why of the whole process. This is what interested me:


Yes, that's a big pile 'o bugs. The children at the preschool gathered them up. Truth told, they are mostly just the shells of the Cicadas that have infested the preschool grounds. *Note slight exaggeration with "infested".

But some of them aren't. Some of them are unshelled, or partly shelled.

Poor little Cicadas.

They've been the most fascinating things to those kids since....well since forever.

Poor little We can't catch a break and had to pop out on the preschool grounds Cicadas. Even worse off were the ones who had their wings burned by popping out in direct sunlight in the middle of the Australian summer...and then got captured and crushed by four year olds.

The next day that pile was a big pile of crushed exoskeletons and bug parts. Nothing funner than crushing bugs, I say.

But although I wasn't fascinated by the entire life cycle, I was fascinated by that part of it I witnessed.

Here's one popping out:


And here's one a bit further along in the process:


I'll have you know that to get this shot (for you) I crawled into a Cicada infested play tunnel on the school grounds. That's the kind of thing I do for you guys.

I'm sure you would appreciate it if you weren't shivering at the grossness of it all.

Finally, I'll leave you with these:






That's Caleb. He takes the Cicada's home to feed to his pet lizard. Caleb's pet lizard is two feet long.

Told you those babies couldn't catch a break.

Thankful I wasn't born a bug,
Angie

PS - Got so many things in the cue to share. Check back tomorrow.