Next week at Bible study, we’ll be starting chapter 3 in Parenting with Wisdom, which is titled, “How to Really Love Your Child.” I’ve been thinking about this for awhile. As I type, my son is nearly giddy with excitement catching bugs for his new pet.
I admit that I saw the Vinegaroon first last night. Of course, Lee caught it, and fed it a cockroach last night and a cricket this morning. The ugly bug made short work of both. Now, our rule about pets is… when a child is old enough to take care of it, he or she can keep it. Really, though, if I were willing to have a pet, we’d probably have one. Lee and I have considered a reptile, but truthfully the idea of supervising a child feeding bugs to a creature is loathsome to me. So we’ve just not ever made that decision. Until now.
Now the advantage of a vinegaroon (also called a whip scorpion) is that he was free, and as long as someone is willing to catch his food, his food is free. His habitat is easy to make (Lee just got some desert sand, rocks, and plants from behind our subdivision). But the pet and his food are BUGS. I don’t like bugs. And my son has one for a pet. Lovely, isn’t it? The fun part is, I’m thinking about how love sometimes makes decisions for the good of someone else, regardless of how we feel about it. BUGS! So I cannot complain. At least between Lee and David, they’ll keep him fed and happy (I just have to suffer crickets and cockroaches in my refrigerator). Now, I don’t think that if you don’t let your child keep bugs in his room you don’t love him. I just want to know, is it too late for me to say I want a dog?
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