I may have eaten a bug… maybe… possibly… but probably not.

I made a lovely dinner tonight, one of the house favorites.  Rice, zucchini, mushrooms and tofu.  They all get cooked up separately and then we pile them on our plate in any configuration we want.  Plus I make a ginger sauce that’s pretty much the end all be all of ginger sauce.  Actually I usually make that meal as an excuse to have the ginger sauce so in the future I should list the ginger sauce first.

Now that we’ve gotten that over with I’ll move on.  It’s been an exceptionally long kind of day.  One of those days that’s supposed to be a lazy family day and somehow turns into a crazy family day where no one feels quite right about anything and the Tricaster isn’t doing what it’s supposed to and the cats are acting like there’s a squirrel in the house but you know there isn’t.  Is just my family that this happens to?

It’s also been one of those parenting fail days.  Every time I try to work on something K does something in an attempt to defeat me.  Add whining, grunting, running and jumping like a mad jungle child that’s never seen a Kleenex, socks or cold water from the fridge.  I may have snapped a time or 4.  Or 7.  Fine maybe 10 times… but she’s gone really off the wall today.

So towards the end of it all, after we worked and laughed and played and worked and snapped and moaned and maybe possibly screamed, but into a pillow to muffle those screams of frustration, I made dinner.  That dinner that I mentioned at the very beginning of this post.  There was much rejoicing, everyone loves that dinner except for the cats who could care less because there’s no meat or dairy products involved… and that’s all the better for us because the cats aren’t congregating at K’s feet waiting for her to drop something.

So as I said the dinner has been made and it smells terrific and I can’t wait to eat it.  We let K decide where to eat thinking that would keep her from complaining that we were stuck inside on a lovely day or outside when she’d rather be inside… she chose to eat on our little patio outside.  Lovely.  I love to hang out on my little front patio.  It makes me happy to look out on the neighborhood I love so much.  So we’re sitting out there and she’s complaining about being outside because “OH MY GAW THERE ARE BUGS!!!” and I’m trying to find that calm center.  I know it’s in there somewhere.  Maybe between the lungs and stomach and kidneys… that soft gooey calm center I have, somewhere.

Suddenly the bugs aren’t a minor nuisance… suddenly she declares loudly that there is a BUG a DEAD bug on her plate and she is not going to eat it.  Any of it.  Ever.  She goes completely ape shit bananas and cries and screams and hollers about this bug, this DEAD BUG on her tofu.

Oh calm center… please come to me.  I need you now more than ever.

“It’s not a bug!” I snap after looking at her plate, digging around in her rice and tofu trying to find it… I find NOTHING.

She insists that it is, that it’s there.  And that it’s a little black and white spider, and she knows that for a fact because it had 8 legs.

EIGHT LEGS DEAD BUG OMG I’M GOING TO DIE!!!

I told her to go get ready for bed.  She said maybe I could look one more time.  She wanted another plate of food…  so I looked and I looked and finally on the back of a piece of tofu I found something that I’m pretty sure was garlic frayed out with tentacle looking things clinging to the tofu.  I gave her the briefest glimpse of it and said “Is this it”

“YES!!!” she cried.

I popped the tofu in my mouth, chewed once and swallowed before telling her that I do not eat bugs.

“Now go finish your dinner” I said giving her back her plate.

Let’s be clear on something… the thing on that tofu?  Well I say there’s a 50-50 shot it was garlic…

I may have eaten a bug… maybe… possibly… but it doesn’t really matter because it bought me about 30 seconds of peace as she started at me with a mix of awe and wonder.

Those 30 seconds were golden.