Curious Jesse

Tonight, Jesse asked me, "Mom, wouldn't it be weird if mealworms smelled like cinnamon?"  How do you even answer a question like that?  Jesse is the greatest question-asker in the Cottle family.  Typically, he asks questions that I have no answer for.  I know I'm in for it when he begins his questions with, "Mom, wouldn't it be weird if...?"  

I have learned to say, "Yes, Jesse.  That would be weird." 

Lately, I am learning lots of facts about mealworms.  Jesse was shocked to learn that I actually knew what mealworms were.  He was even more shocked that I'd seen them.  When I told him that we'd bought some a few years ago to feed to Jacob's bearded dragon, Smaug, his eyes got really wide.  I had taught him something that he did not know:  Mealworms are food for lizards.  He informed me in the middle of dinner that mealworms look like maggots.  As it happened, we were eating dinner at Chick-Fil-A, and he announced that little fact in a loud voice.  See, you can't teach that.  That's breeding, right there. 

We had a little chat about how maggots are not dinner table discussion. 

Jesse is my sweet boy, who has a sensitive and whimsical nature.  He also likes weapons, and aspires to work as a policeman or border patrol agent because they get to carry large-caliber guns.  He's a little ray of sunshine, that boy. 

We call him Jesse Bear, because when he was a baby he'd growl like a bear.  We'd say, "Ooooh...scary!  Jesse's a bear!"  It just stuck.  There is a whole series of Jesse Bear books that we discovered, and read to him nightly when he was small.  He thought that those books had been written about him.  Tonight, we were reading a book about dangerous animals, and he asked me what my favorite bear was.  When I told him it is a grizzly bear, he said, "Me, too.  Can you call me Grizzly Bear instead of Jesse Bear?"  Hmm...I'll have to think about that one.  It's just not the same.  I think he'd have to have a mountain man beard and weigh about 250 pounds to pull that nickname off.  Come to think of it, the way he eats lately, he might make that weight in a few years...


Many blessings,

Jennifer