Friday, September 19, 2008

Differences

15 minutes ago, while on the phone with Clint, I heard Emma screaming my name in terror. My reaction time was a tad sluggish because I had to wrap up my conversation with Clint, so by the time I was able to see what the commotion was, she was standing on the toilet yelling, "A lobster just went into your bedroom!"

A what?

"A lobster just went into your bedroom!" she yelled. I was confused; she seemed so adamant, and for one split second I actually scanned my bedroom floor for a lobster. After quickly realizing I was being ridiculous, I asked her to again repeat what she saw. She was in near hysterics, and yelled again, "I just saw a lobster go into your bedroom!" I looked again on my bedroom floor and found the source of her concern.

A tiny scorpion.

Now, is it just me or should she know, as a 2nd grader, what the difference is between a lobster and a scorpion?

Don't get me wrong. I'm greatly concerned that there was an uninvited scorpion in my house, and even more displeased that had Emma not been in the bathroom at that exact moment, it would have gone unnoticed until it was in my bed biting me. We've only ever found one other scorpion in the house, and it was the day we had sod delivered to our home for the front yard. I'm assuming all the current work in the back yard is disturbing whatever habitat they've created for themselves, but honestly, I can't get it out of my head that my daughter doesn't know the difference between a lobster and a scorpion.

8 comments:

Monique said...

Honest mistake. The look a lot alike...minus that pointed dagger on the end of one of them. It was so small, she probably just thought it was a baby lobster.

Um...yeah, aren't they worse than the bigger ones?! I haven't had any in the house...but we have found a few in the storage room, by the camping stuff. Wishful thinking is they were stowaways.

Christensen's said...

Well, I would be hysterical if I saw one in my house too..no matter what it is, they are pretty freaky looking! I am glad that she saw it so you could catch it and hopefully kill it. Unless you are like my family and put it in a baby food jar and watch it from the window seal! Yeah, I know we are weird!
w_janica@hotmail.com

Crystal said...

My kids will yell that there is a bee in our house when it is a house fly. Go figure! We caught a scorpion our house once too. The kids were screaming that there was on the ceiling in their room. We didn't believe them and told them to go back to bed. They insisted we check out. Boy, were we shocked. We put it in a jar until it ran out of air and died. It took a long time to die. Not fun.

Rachael said...

It does look like a lobster on a much tiny scale! I would be nervous to have one in our home. Thankfully in the 13 years we have lived in desert areas we haven't had one!

Diana said...

I say kudos to Emma for calling it something that was (vaguely) similar. Nobody ever makes picture books of poisonous animals-- apparently they should. I know my kids wouldn't know what a scorpion looks like.

Jenny D. said...

Or you could be like my brothers (their names shall be David & Neal) and go around your backyard at night with a blacklight, collect all the glowing scorpions you find into a mason jar, then leave said jar sitting on a precarious shelf until their little sister (we'll call her Cami) accidentally knocks it off so it breaks and 20+ scorpions of various sizes go scurrying away and you're thankful that at least the jar was outside and that the brother named David was home to kill most of them and then wonder why he didn't kill them all in the first place. Yes, that was all one sentence. I was going for the record. And yes, my family is crazy because their reasoning for putting 20+ scorpions into one jar was to see what they would eventually do to each other and I have to admit that I was intrigued and a little bummed that we didn't get to see the experiment unfold.

Anonymous said...

Emma is more right than she knows! They are both invertebrates, and arthropods. The lobster is just a big sea bug. They sprang from the same evolutionary branch a long time ago. Wish it were a lobster; then you could have just grabbed a bib, claw crackers, and a dish of melted butter . . .
PS Scorpions eat smaller bugs so they are not ALL that bad, except if you step on them :)

Anonymous said...

yikes a scorpion!