Luck Be A Lady...Bug?

Our master bathroom is swarming with ladybugs. And when I say “swarming” I mean I counted at least ten. In my opinion, when dealing with nature, anything more than five constitutes a swarm.

I think I read somewhere that a ladybug in the house is good luck. Or is that crickets? Regardless, I don’t care how lucky they are. They are little bits of nature that have come into my home uninvited. So I don’t like it.

And now I find I can’t get that disturbing nursery rhyme out of my head:

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.
Your house in on fire and your children are gone.
All except one, and that’s Little Anne,
For she has crept under the warming pan.

Nursery rhymes are twisted.

I tried reciting the rhyme for the ladybugs hoping they would take heed and head on back home to check on their families, but to no avail. Apparently, ladybugs don’t care about their children.

L typically freaks whenever she sees a bug or a spider, but doesn’t seem bothered by the ladybugs. She’s also partial to caterpillars -- actually in a somewhat freaky, obsessive way. Last year in preschool, there was a tree on the playground where L’s class spent recess that was infested with mounds and mounds of caterpillars. As soon as she got outside, L would head straight to the tree and proceed to pick up as many of the creepy, furry things as she could get. She would line them up and down her arm and let them crawl all over her. Her teacher told me that she would encourage the other children to come see her little friends and she’d very gently place them on her classmates’ arms and show them how to handle the glorified worms without squishing them. She was like the freakin’ Caterpillar Whisperer. She doesn’t get that from me.

L thinks the ladybugs are cool. Z was also excited about them -- but, then again, he also gets excited by “Yo, Gaba Gaba.” So, I can’t really trust his judgment.

Side note: Have you seen “Yo, Gaba Gaba?” I’m thinking you have to be on crack in order to understand it. Maybe I should start doing random drug tests on Z. However, I will say that I do find myself oddly and disturbingly attracted to D.J. Lance. I wonder if I could get one of those orange jump-suits for JAO...

Anyway, back to the ladybugs. I’ve noticed that the ladybugs seem to prefer congregating around the big picture window over the tub in the master bath.

Side note again: I just spent way more time than I should have trying to decide if I needed to use congregate or conjugate in the preceding sentence. Then I was cracking myself up thinking about all those ladybugs clinging to the window pane and repeating, “Yo estoy, tu estas el esta, nosotros estamos, ellos estan.” I’m just assuming, of course, that the ladybugs are conjugating Spanish verbs because, well, I don’t like French -- or France.

But, back to the ladybugs.

Last night, as I was giving the kids a bath, one of the nature bits fell into the tub, was lost amongst the bubbles and drowned. I was afraid the kids would be traumatized by the death, but they seemed oddly nonplussed. Little sociopaths.

So, maybe ladybugs in the house aren’t so lucky after all...at least not for the ladybugs.