A Book for the Burning List

September 12, 2007 – 7:33 am |

I’m not afraid of bugs. I’m not a bug-lover by any means, but I can deal with the occasional creepy-crawly. This has proven useful in my life. If you need someone to step up to the plate and take out the nasty spider, or steer the buzzing bee out of the house, I’m your woman.

Unfortunately, if a trait such as this is genetic, this gift did not pass down to my increasingly girly four-year-old daughter. She hates bugs. And she’s not afraid to show it. If, for example, she sees a fly or gnat in the bathroom, she will shriek, sob and run from the room in the kind of panic most of the rest of the world saves for something a bit more serious - like nuclear war or armageddon. She will then boycott that particular bathroom for several days until I can persuade her that the nasty beast has departed.

Because I believe it’s important for girls to live at peace in the world with bugs, we’ve had long conversations about how most bugs won’t harm her. I’ve tried explaining that some bugs are actually good and useful. She’s been unimpressed.

So when I ran across the picture book I Love Bugs: First Facts and Pictures by Steve Parker on sale at Barnes and Noble for only $4.98, I grabbed it up enthusiastically. It’s a lovely hardcover book with blues, greens, glitter and a pretty butterfly on the front, that markets itself on the back as “ideal” for sharing with my young child. I was anxious to begin the pro-bug education.

We sat down to read the book.

“Dragonfly,” I read, “Dragonflies are fierce hunting insects.”

She tensed up. “Ooh, sounds scary. Do we have Dragonflies around here?”

I hurried through more facts about the Dragonfly - about how it has a sharp mouth and big eyes - hopeful that the next pages would be a little more helpful.

“Praying Mantis,” I continued reading. “Few insects are fiercer than the praying mantis.” We’ll just skip the praying mantis, I thought, and turned the page quickly. Two pages later, I arrived at Earwig.

“Earwig,” I started. “Earwigs don’t crawl in people’s ears.”

My daughter gasped.

“Do other bugs crawl in people’s ears? What kinds of bugs crawl in your ears?”

I fumbled through an answer I can’t quite recall, gritted my teeth, and moved on.

By the end of the book my daughter had learned that army ants “kill any animal they come across”, that locusts “take to the air in a huge, hungry cloud”, and that the great diving beetle has “fierce” jaws. I think my favorite lesson of the book - living here in the mosquito capital of the world- was about the mosquito.

“Mosquito,” the book defines, “[m]any insects spread germs and disease. The mosquito is one of the most dangerous… it may pass on a terrible illness such as malaria or yellow fever.”

So much for my daughter’s career as an entomologist. By the time I finished reading the book, even I started to have a little fear of bugs.