Your guide to activities and fun things to do with your preschoolers, toddlers and kids in kansas city, KS

Bugs and the Night Time.

by Jenny Meade

July 13, 2009

I've always been somewhat of a bedtime freak - as in - when my kids were smaller, they'd go to bed at 8pm, no matter what. Seriously, I once considered not taking them to the basement during a tornado warning because it would have screwed with bedtime. (And also it wasn't really that close to us, but our sirens were going off anyway. The sirens here go by city and my city is like ten miles long.)

I survived the toddler years based on this obsession with the 8pm bedtime.  It kept me sane.  Because "Sleep is For The Weak" hadn't come out yet. 

You might be guessing that keeping eight and six year olds to an 8pm bedtime, in the summer, when ALL OF THEIR FRIENDS DONT HAVE TO GO TO BED MOM LOOK THEY ARE IN OUR BACKYARD AND ITS NOT EVEN DARK doesn't really work so well. 

(You may have also noticed I'm not really all that sane these days. That's a different post.)

Anyway, all this is to tell you that the upside to letting my kids stay up a little bit later during the summer is that they've learned about the awesomeness that are lightening bugs (or fireflies, as some people call them.) And also cicadas, which make the most wonderful symphony of noise on a hot summer night. And because very little can beat the crunchy, disgusting goodness that are cicada shells for a bug obsessed little boy.

So, as the dusk fades to dark and the cicadas get into their rhythm, the lightening bugs come out. And suddenly the boys are running through the yard clapping their hands together, trying to gently capture a Sprite with a green glowing tail. And of course they want to keep them, put them in a jar with holes stabbed into the lid and stalks of grass. But then when you explain that they will die before morning, they will open the jar and watch them fly away. 

Watching my little boys staying up late and playing with the bugs in the yard is strangely satisfying. And maybe this new routine - the one where we sit outside and catch up with friends and play in the grass until way past when the streetlights come on- maybe this routine is a good one, too.

(If you click this link to the Cicada Wikipedia page, you can watch a time-release video of a cicada molting it's shell. It's really gross. And also really cool.)

Bugs

by Rita Arens

June 16, 2008

My daughter has a love/hate relationship with bugs. Every day when I pick her up from daycare, she recites a litany of the bugs she saw that day, including imaginary bugs. We bought her a bug catcher and have been preparing her for late summer (when it gets dark earlier) when we will conduct The Great Lightning Bug Hunt. (This is a catch-and-release program, unlike in my tender Iowa youth, when  Read more...