Is there a centipede in the house?

When the weather is really crappy, we have to have our after school snacks indoors.

Funny to say that, since until this year, it was actually outside our license to serve food to children anywhere but at a table INside a building. If the weather was beautiful and the kids wanted to eat outside, I had to say no, that it was against that big set of rules that I have to follow.

But that was in the Time Before.

Now, most afternoons I pack my list of child names and family contact information, the sign in sheet, my notebook with a list of my kids, the first aid kit, the site phone, food service gloves, spoons, cups for crackers or goldfish or whatever, little tubs of applesauce or oranges or yogurt and we all troop out to the playground to eat. If you're thinking that sounds like a real pain in the ass, you're right. But all of those things have to be with us everywhere we go.

But if it's wet or really chilly, we eat our snacks inside.

Since there is not enough room in our classroom for the kids to be unmasked and eat together, we utilize the hallway where we can be six feet apart. It's funny though, I have a few sibling pairs who, since they live in the same house, sit closer together during snacks. Then their friends, who in several cases spent part of the weekend at their houses, want to sit closer, too.

I'm supposed to be keeping the kids three feet apart all the time. The reality is that no one is enforcing that space. They line up for school in the morning, all crowded together. Their teachers are right in the thick of it, too. I think the reason that most people have stayed reasonably healthy is that everyone is pretty good about keeping their masks on.

Our school is very old. Built in the 1920s. Full of mysterious noises and creaking and thumping when the heating system is starting up in the mornings.
Lots of dark old wood on the door frames and window frames.
Big linoleum squares on the floors.
No screens on the windows.
That weird waffly wired glass in several doors.
Not ADA compliant.

Since the building is so old, many hundreds of generations of assorted bugs have lived and died there. Ants and beetles and a new one on me, the house centipede.  The first time I saw one I thought it was a roach. It was blonde and looked like it was an oval shape. I've since learned that the leg placement is what gives it that oval appearance, but that it's actually a straight bodied critter with a whole lotta legs.

This one is from the internet, but yep, that's the guy.

I haven't seen many of them. According to the wisdom of the interwebs, if you do see a LOT of them, you have a ton of other bugs because that's what they eat.

So last week we had a deluge over a few days, meaning we ate and did everything else indoors, too.

While the kids were sitting in the hallway eating their animal cookies and yogurt, Jenna (she's 5, people, and in Kindergarten )  suddenly said, "Hey! You guys!!  Come look at this cool bug!"

Jenna was on her knees, face inches away from the bug, inspecting it closely.

Half of the kids let out scared/horrified noises and scooched the other way as fast as they could. A few went, "Oooh, let me see!"  One or two said, "Kill it!"

You all know my position on killing the creatures that share our space, so I was quick to say, "NO! Leave it alone!"

So the ones who were afraid of it stayed far away and I scooped it up in a paper cup and let it go outside our door. It crawled into a crack under the ramp right away, I'm sure it was back in the building within a couple minutes.

We had a discussion about bugs in general. That was the first opportunity I've had to tell them about catching them and relocating things like spiders.

I have a unit about bugs (Please bug me!) that I wrote years ago when I worked for the Evil Empire. The kids always enjoyed the interesting facts. I even have a nutritional chart with food information about insects.

Here's one with information about a serving of crickets.

Makes ya hungry, doesn't it?