Bugs: Friend or Foe?

First, yesterday’s school went really well.  He alphabetized his spelling words and wrote definitions, learned cursive D, practiced place values in Math, and we started Spanish.  Our first Spanish lesson was about nouns being male or female (masculine or feminine, but male or female is easier to say.)  I remember from French in high school about the whole male/female thing, but it is a tough concept to learn.  So we learned el, los, la and las for our “the”, and un, unos, una and unas for our “a/an”.  We learned that words that end in “o” are male and words that end in “a” are female and all others just need to be memorized to know which one to use.  Tyler did good with it, but he is sure that this is just going to confuse him for learning English.  I’m thinking he’s already learned enough English that he isn’t going to be that confused.

Now onto bugs.  We have a program this afternoon at the library on “Bugs: Friend or Foe?”  You all know that I already consider bugs our friends and have passed that on to Tyler.  However, I would like the ants that keep wanting to come in the kitchen window to stay outside because there is plenty of food for them out there.  Seriously, no chemicals have been used in our yard so everything out there should be really healthy.  Either that or I need some spiders to come ant hunting.  All the spiders I’ve seen in the yard lately have egg sacks, so I’m hoping for a good crop of baby spiders soon.  Back to the program, I don’t know how much Tyler will get out of the program, but he should have fun, so it’s worth it.

As for other bugs at our house, we currently have a caterpillar in residence.  Grams found it while she was trimming some of her bushes and sent it home with us.  We know it is a Swallowtail and we are thinking that it is a Black Swallowtail, to be precise.  I don’t have any pictures of ours, but you can see some great lifecycle pictures at this website: http://www.pbase.com/rcm1840/lifecycleofblsw  Our caterpillar is somewhere between the 3rd instar stage and full grown.  It loves to hide on the leaves in the butterfly tent that we have it in.  Maybe it will make it’s chrysalis soon and we can watch it emerge later.

The update on the worms (though they are not bugs) is that they are really happy with the coffee grounds and seem to be having more babies.  I just have to keep an eye on them so that the dirt doesn’t get too dried out.