That’s a Stinky Beetle

How many times have you said the phrase “Dung Beetle” today?  Not enough times I can assure you.  Cuz it’s been phrase of the day at our house.  Our seven year old chose this particular bug to be the focus of his recent school project involving a life-size model and a creative story where the beetle is the main character.  His Oma (Traci’s mom) even helped him make a pretty sweet model of the little bug out of clay.  Why did he choose the dung beetle you may ask?  Well, because this little creature is famous for . . .

wait for it . . .

playing with poop. 

Yep, that’s pretty much the extent of the logic behind the selection.  That trait has so endeared the dung beetle to my kids that I’m pretty sure they’d trade me in for one of those guys.  My last experience in playing with poop was limited to some involuntary toxic cleanup during our potty-training days.  Where was Captain Dung Beetle then?!  Twice I had a two year old drop a “dirty bomb” in the middle of the kitchen floor and start playing with it.  If you haven’t had this experience, it’s pretty much an instant rainbow of emotions, all at once you wanna scream, laugh hysterically, cry, fetch the camera, cover the kid with a towel/sheet, or run out the front door.  But after the rounds of emotions I usually settled on:

Call for my wife.

I just didn’t want her to feel left out.  I assure you my motives were purely altruistic . . . except when I tried to act invisible.  This never worked though, and I did usually get the toxic duties if I was home at the time of the incident.  Why is it that scooping up doggy “stuff” is so much more pleasant than cleaning up the “output” of small children?  Ponder that one . . .

Anyway, that’s probably one blog post more than you needed to read on this topic.  But it did give me a chance to think about a whole bunch of appropriate synonyms for the word ‘poop,’ so at least one of us had a laugh.