The Worm Mystery

It's been raining for as long as I can remember. That means the worms come out and slither about on the driveway. It also means that Dear Son is genuinely entertained. Yesterday evening while I was at work, the husband took the kids outside to play in between rain showers. He later reported to me that Dear Son became infatuated with a worm and had to hold it. In his little fist. For 30 minutes. When they went back inside, Dear Husband claims he insisted the worm couldn't come in with them. By that time, he said, the poor little worm was a wadded up ball of a worm mess.

That's how he told me the story, and I didn't think much more of it until Dear Son woke up from his nap with his new squirt gun, which attached itself to his little hands when he discovered it on an end cap at the Food Mart this morning, and which he had not parted with since that first moment he laid eyes on it in the store. When I came into his room after his nap, he was standing in his crib jabbering about a worm being inside his squirt gun. I told him there wasn't a worm in there, but he kept insisting, so I peeked in the hole. All I saw was a lump that looked like where the two colors of plastic joined. "Nope!" I said confidently, "no worms!" He kept insisting, so then I said, "What is it? Do you WANT to put a worm in there?" And he replied, "Yeah!" I told him something to the effect of that not being proper and then we moved on to the potty.
Today he actually wanted to sit on the potty and even did so with his britches down, so I went with it and have put him back on it several times. Trying right after nap time seemed to make sense, so that's what we did. The four of us huddled there at potty seat level; Dear Son, his squirt gun, Dear Daughter, and myself. That's when I saw something reddish black go rolling across the floor. I quickly picked it up to examine it, and it was most clearly a waded up, nearly completely dehydrated worm, which Son had apparently shoved in his new squirt gun. Husband swears last night's worm didn't come inside. We didn't collect anymore worms that I knew of today, but then Son loves to shove "treasures" in his pockets, so who knows. He may have found it on the driveway or in the Food Mart parking lot and shoved it in his pocket before I could catch him in the act. Or he may have somehow managed to bring one to bed with him last night (unbeknownst to anyone else) and spent the night with it, and then discovered it still in his bed after nap time. At which time he shoved it in his new squirt gun.

This boy thing gets pretty interesting some days.