Sunroom Sundries

It's been an interesting few days in our sun room. Happily it has been getting cool enough that we've been able to go out there in the mornings and evenings. Last night I noticed a praying mantis on the sun room door.

This morning it had been joined by another praying mantis... I took a closer look and indeed they were doing what bugs do on the Nature Channel. I dimly remembered learning something quite horrible in high school biology class about praying mantises and I was scared.

I hoped against hope that my memory was wrong. But I couldn't be sure if it was or it wasn't. The uncertainty of it all drew me (against my better judgment!) to check back on the mantises throughout the day.

At first they were continuing to do what they had been doing. Then the moment came when all my fears were realized. I don't think I want to fully explain what happened, but it involved cannibalism... go ask your biology teacher for details. After my dreaded suspicion was confirmed I no longer checked back, but I did hum taps for the male praying mantis.

The wikipedia entry on praying mantids was quite interesting. Apparently one can keep them as pets and feed them crickets. (Mattox, are you reading this?) I started thinking that might be a fun sort of science project to do with Maria when she gets older - keep a praying mantis in a little terrarium and feed it crickets. There certainly is no shortage of crickets here among the corn and soybean fields! But now I'm wondering if this feeding of crickets would be too gross and would scar Maria for life. I figure as her mother I'm totally doomed... no matter what I do I'll scar her for life in somehow, but I'd like to keep the damage as minimal as possible!

PS. This picture was taken before anything too terrible happened. The odd part is that the female was missing one arm, but that didn't stop her from doing what she did. Such aggressive little critters!

WNBA Player or Lion Tamer?

At her 2 month appointment Maria was in the 99th percentile for height... that means she's taller than 99 out of 100 girl babies her age! It's kind of neat to have a tall baby, but upon further consideration it's odd to be proud of something I really didn't have much to do with. I did contribute half her DNA, but I had no control over how tall I am, much less how tall she is! I'm a bit worried about the height thing since it's bad for women to be too tall (and for men to be too short)... it makes it really hard to find someone to date. Call me superficial, but I never could date someone shorter than me. Happily, Mark has solved all my problems in that area! ( :

I figure if Maria keeps growing at this rate she can have a career in the WNBA as long as she takes after her daddy in terms of coordination. Then a few days (well, really weeks... I'm super behind on blogging!) ago she started hitting her little stuffed lion on the play gym. She was totally going to town and hit that poor lion until she was tired out. Later that evening Maria was fussing while laying in her play gym. Mark noticed she was looking at the lion and when he moved her within striking range of the lion she stopped fussing!

All of this is to say that our daughter could turn out to be a lion tamer or a WNBA player or anything in between. After teaching for 4 years at a magnet high school for the gifted, I've witnessed a lot of highly-driven and successful parents get pretty pushy about their children's math grades. They are at the top of a math related field and can't accept that their son or daughter may not be as adept or interested as they were in mathematics. Sometimes it's just a maturity issue on the part of the student, but often kids simply have different interests from their parents. After seeing the agony the "I'm good at ____, so you must be equally good at ____" attitude causes, I'm determined to be open minded when it comes to Maria's future. Admittedly this is easier said than done, but I'm trying to prepare myself for her falling in love with art or sports or lion taming or even advertising (yuck!).