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Sometimes ya gotta wonder January 10, 2008

Posted by Anya in : spontaneous degeneration, smiling is good for you , 3comments

Also known as, sometimes I’m delighted that I’m homeschooled, and not off at college a year early, because I’d hate to miss these sorts of things.

Today, I was in finishing up Chinese class, and Chrissie and Ib were supposed to be doing Latin chants. 

Ib came bounding up the stairs (apparently the people in my lesson were talking too loudly) and yelled at me, before yanking the door shut, “YI ZHI MAO!”

Right.

Sure.

That made perfect sense.

He actually does apparently know what it means… so I kind of have to wonder why he was yelling “A CAT” at me as if it were the same as “BE QUIET”.

(Mom says she had told him to shut the door so that they wouldn’t be getting Latin and Chinese mixed up.  I’m still failing to see what yi zhi mao had to do with it.)

Item number two from the wonderful world of Ib.

I was almost done with my stats and he came skidding into our bedroom.  “Come quick!” he panted.

I protested, but he insisted that there was something he had to show me right away.  So I left stats and Casting Crowns and followed my brother.

“Since you are interested in science,” he began, clutching a little pencil sharpener (you can see a picture of it on Mom’s blog, here) which he then directed my attention to.  I squinted at it and made out the shape of a miniscule fruit fly.  “It’s really loud,” said Ib.  “It sounds like Daddy outside when he is cutting with that [insert sawing noise here] thing.”

He then directed my attention to the corner of his bedroom where the radiators meet up.  Oh joy.  A spiderweb.  I apparently haven’t dusted his room in too long.  Oh further joy.  A spider.  He only very recently has stopped screaming for me at the slightest scent of a spider. 

But no.  I was not being summoned in to kill the spider, nor to watch it be killed at the hands of my Heroic, Daring Brother.  To the contrary.  He upended the pencil sharpener above the spiderweb and removed the lid.  There was a tense moment while it appeared that the fruit fly had missed the web.  But then it became apparently that, huzzah, it had landed in the web!  The startled spider went over and began winding it up.  Talk about a delivery service!

“This is so interesting,” said Ib, watching intently.

“You spoil that spider rotten!” I replied.

“It’s my pet, I have two more,” he informed me.  (Just what I wanted to know.  But the other two have their webs up by the ceiling, so he cannot drop little gifts into them.)  “Well,” he explained, “I don’t usually feed him.”  He switched into his I-am-quoting-from-a-movie-and-you-are-expected-to-realize-this voice.  “It’s so rare that we catch one!”  (This, of course, I identified as a quote from The Ultimate Sob story Gift.)

Interesting.  Verrrrrrry interesting.

But I had stats waiting, so I couldn’t hang around while the spider (anyone else thinking of Be Kind to Spiders?) ate the little fruit fly’s guts.  :)