What's the weirdest thing you did as a child ?
Answers
Answer: teeth
Explanation:
Answer:
When I was a little girl I was facinated by those little bugs that curl up into a ball when you touch them. They have segmented armor, because they are actually a crustacean. Some people call them rolypolies or pillbugs. will give you all the information you ever wanted to know about pillbugs. Maybe more.
We had a large backyard and they lived in parts of it. Some people think they are pests but my mother cultivated places for frogs because they ate bugs in her garden. Pillbugs liked the same places.
I decided I was going to keep some as a pet, inside the house with me. I had studied them in our backyard and believed that I knew what they needed to thrive, so I found an empty shoebox, filled it with damp soil, a large branch with bark that was coming off from an apple tree, and decaying leaves. Then I put pill bugs in the box. Not too many, but enough that they wouldn’t get lonely (I was only 7).
Everyday I made sure to dampen my pillbug home by spritzing it with water. I didn’t know they must have a humid environment, but I had discovered they liked it damp but not wet. Naturally I kept the lid on my shoebox because I knew they liked the dark and I wanted it to remain damp.
My pillbugs thrived! I had to find them more decaying leaves. I noticed there were some leaves they seem to like better than others, so I brought them leaves like that. I found little exoskeletons, which meant they were growing.
One day there little baby pillbugs! I was so excited. Except suddenly there was a problem. There were a lot of babies and when you have lots of pillbugs and a small amount of space, they leave, looking for more space. I was upset because baby pillbugs can’t survive in the house.
I was noisy in my upset state and my mother came in and said “What do you have in that box?” Mom knew me well and I’m sure she knew it was something from outside that really needed to stay outside.
“Oh, Mommy come see,” I said. I felt sure she would share my love of pillbugs and help me fix the problem of the runaway babies. I rushed over to the box, telling her about my pillbugs and how I’d been caring for them. As I removed the lid, there were babies crawling out and around the outside. I started to draw her attention to them, to tell her what an awful thing was happening and—
—mom said “Oh Lisa, no, you can’t have those in the house. They will crawl out and be everywhere until they die.”
Suddenly I had the horrible feeling you have when things are not happening like you expected and were only going to get worse.
I switched to explain-and-convince mode. “They weren’t crawling out, not until now and—”
—she picked up my box to take it outside, so I went to Emergency mode.
I screamed.
In temper-tantrum mode, I hollered that I could do it, it was my box, I could carry it. I let fly the tears.
“Okay, then,” Mom said. “Then you take it outside. I will go with you and help you put them back where they should live.”
Sniffling, I carried out the box. I had to be careful because it was damp and unstable, not to mention crawling with baby pillbugs.
We took them out where I had originally found them and carefully spread out their box habitat so that they could reintegrate themselves into pillbug society. Then my mother commented on my box and listened to me tell her about how I had studied the pillbugs and built their home, about the spritzing and the exoskeletons. She said, “You must have been doing this for awhile.” I proudly told her that yes, I had, and my pillbugs had done very well.
She did a great job, my mother. She made it clear that outside critters were to stay outside and made sure I understood and agreed. (It was important that I did, or else I would do it again and then I would be in trouble.) Yet she didn’t punish me, which was good. Having to free my pillbugs was a logical consequence that was punishment enough. She praised my research and my habitat design. She was impressed my pillbugs had done so well and I had taken such care with them. By handling it the way she did, she encouraged my interest in science but she also had me put them back where I found them (an environmental lesson), and fulfilled her job as a parent.