Greeny

Wow.  Monday is awful isn't it?  Well, Rex hates it.

He cried all around the grocery shop while Buzz, Jessie and Woody made me say things that made other customers smirk as they passed us.  It's a bit of a blur, but I do remember hissing to them that I'd attached a device to the trolley that caused it to deliver a strong electric shock to all unearthed children who touched it. Completely justified.  I'd struggled to manoeuver the trolley with one hand while Rex, who refused to snuggle down in the baby cradle thing lined with layers of his soft Storchenwiege wrap, cried in my other arm while the three big children tried to "guide" the trolley in all the wrong directions then fought each other to get into it from where they could do nothing but stand on the lamingtons.

They're good shoppers in twos and threes.  Four just breaks the zen.  When we were done, I declared to the quiet, echo-y carpark, "I am never buying groceries ever again!  What could we possibly need so much that would make that experience worthwhile?"  I am 55% sure there was nobody else in the carpark.

The challenges keep on coming.  I just moaned to Mr de Elba via Google Talk:  "Am wondering what to do with these miserable scraps of life-extinguished fowl before I can call them 'dinner.'"  He replied, "Sounds palatable."

I'll try to redeem today by telling all you non-facebooking friends and relatives out there about Greeny.

Mum has been growing chickpeas, and they are delicious to eat fresh.  We were munching our way through a container of them when I noticed one chickpea shell had a hole out of which was crawling a green grub.  "Shall I squash it with my fingers?" I thought.  "Not worth getting icky green grub blood on my fingers - I'll just put it over there for now, and take it outside later.  Some random bird will solve the problem for me."

Unfortunately, between then and later, the grub had been named, and was therefore, in the eyes of three of my small dependents, "a pet."

Allow me to introduce you to "Greeny."

 

 We've kept him alive for quite a few days now, because as my friend The Accidental Housewife pointed out, we know what he eats.  However he has gone off chickpeas and moved on to pumpkin and lettuce, so I'm not sure what to do with him when he turns up his nose at that and desires something else.  But if he thinks he can refuse his veggies and then ask for dessert, he has another think coming.

Each day, he gets an urge to hop onto the rim of his container and motor around it quickly a few times, almost as if he's having daily exercise.  If he was a 55 year old man, he'd call it his "constitutional" and use words like "bracing."  At many points in his constitutional, he stops and tries to make a break for it.  Like the refusing veggies thing, I am having none of it.

Greeny gives me a scare every day - he hides in his lettuce and can't be found.  This, along with the potential for his haphazard diet and random habitat to cause him to be rapidly re-classified as "Browny" prompted me to ask Jessie the other day, "Sweetheart, if Greeny dies or gets himself lost, will we cry, or will we be okay with that?"

Without skipping a beat, she replied, "Cry."

I feel the pressure is on me.  The happiness of a number of small children depends on my ability to nurture this green grub to the cocoon-building stage and beyond.  The best-case scenario involves Greeny hatching and being released into the wild for the purpose of laying eggs which will hatch into other vegetable-eating pests for the joy of my neighbours and myself.

In reality, I only hope Greeny manages to fly out of sight of the children before being snapped up by a bird.

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Greeny Part 2: "Goodbye my larva, 'tis time to pupate"
Greeny Part 3: "In which procrastination finds me out"