Minister's Study

Ministering, writing, and wrestling in a land flowing with sweet tea and deep-fried food

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

No escargo for you, young lady!

On Memorial Day, we took a walk down to the beach. Now, I'm glad my daughter is generally okay with the critter side of life. She's far more amused by things like frogs and worms than terrified. (In fact, ever since I dug up some worms with her to go fishing once, she hunts them down whenever she's outside. You'd think she'd want to play with the dog, but no, she hunts worms instead.) She's even okay with me catching snakes and holding them for her to pet. But sometimes she goes a little too far.

When we got to the beach, the tide was the lowest I'd seen it, and the beach there has a very gradual slope -- this meant that quite a bit of beach was exposed. It was strewn with seaweed, shells, rocks, glass, garbage; you know, the usual stuff for a beach near an east coast city. As we walked along, I saw a tiny sea snail puttering around in the wet sand. I picked it up and showed it to my daughter. She was delighted with her new pet, and decided to carry it along as we walked. That was fine until we came to a stretch with hundreds, nay, thousands of the snails all around us. My daughter started harvesting them, grabbing them up as fast as she could. By the time I got her stopped, she had a full handful of little snails, and probably wouldn't have stopped until she had an armload. Since we're not big fans of the eating of snails, I made her leave them all behind.

Ironically, at dinner that night, she wanted to pet her shrimp instead of eating it. We finally convinced her that the shrimp was dead, that she'd never met it in life, that it was yummy, and that it would have been delighted to be eaten. You know, from the little I remember from when I was four, everything I did and said made perfect sense to me. I wonder if that's true for her.

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