Sneaky, Creepy, Crawlies

We have a box full of these in our house:

And sometimes, they find their way out of the box, and not necessarily for the purposes they were intended either.

They look quite harmless in these pictures. 
All the primary colors and educational aspects that are in the details.
You have your standard caterpillar.  Not to be confused with the "woolly worm" or "willy worm" depending on which side of the Mississippi you grew up on.

Next is the cricket with its wonderful summer time chirp.  The chirp that is wonderful when you hear it just a couple of times.  Not so wonderful according to my childhood memories when a cricket would get in the house and chirp and chirp and you can't fall asleep.  Then you turn on the lights and look for the cricket, following the chirp, and of course, the cricket STOPS chirping the minute you START looking for it! 

And the grasshopper.  Grasshoppers are pretty harmless, unless you've just heard the Bible story about all of the locusts and then you start to convince yourself that grasshoppers are indeed locusts and you start to freak out just a bit.

Oh.  You don't do that?  Then it IS just me.

And then we have the spider.  My nemesis among all nemeses or is that nemesi?  Regardless, I am a spider hater.  I know.  I know.  They eat mosquitoes and do the world a wonderful service.  I just can't stand them.  I tolerate the Daddy Long Legs variety, but anything beyond that sends instant goosebumps all over my body and a rapid heartbeat.

Dragonflies are an insect you don't see a lot of unless there's water nearby, like a pond or something.  Your backyard pool may draw them in too.  I don't know.  I don't have a backyard pool.  These don't bother me too much either.

So there's beetles and flies and I'm not sure what good either of these insects are either.  Especially the flies.  Owen asked me the other day why God made flies and really, I had no good answer for him, other than maybe God made flies so the spiders and birds and frogs would have something to eat.  Maybe the fly's only purpose is be something else's food.  What a horrible existence.  But, considering where a fly is usually born, I think I'd rather be eaten up sooner rather than later!

So I mentioned that these bugs have been finding their way out of their box for reasons other than what their purpose is.  Their purpose is for a fun little matching game for the preschool/kindergarten set.  We received this box-o-challenge as a hand-me-down from my nieces when they outgrew it.  It's made my Usborne, the same home sales company that offers children's books.

Kids can learn about patterns and sequencing, matching not only the colors, but also the type of insect.

This box-o-bugs has served its purpose well in our house and is probably ready to be retired to the garage sale pile or handed down to a friend with younger children.  At any rate, I need to get the box-o-bugs out of the house.

"Why?" you might ask? 
Because, my kids think it's particularly funny to put bugs under my pillow, inside my underwear drawer, inside a shoe. 
You name it!

It all started with Owen.  He took a beautifully, colorful spider and hid it under his older brother, Evan's, pillow when no one was looking.  I'm tucking Evan in one night and he about hit the ceiling when he jumped out of bed realizing there was a spider in his bed!  Hilarious, I'm thinking, until two nights later, I find a whole colony of spiders inside my bed, under the sheets.

Yes.  I would say.  Those are VERY Busy Bugs!