Saved by the Shoe

We stopped by my parents' house yesterday after the moms' support group meeting and the girls' doctor appointment. My parents have a plastic see-saw that they picked up somewhere, and AJ and MM headed straight for it.

The girls are really getting quite good at working the teeter-totter and had been playing on it for a while when they started going faster and rougher. At that point AJ's clogs started falling off. They'd fall off, we'd help her put them back on, and they'd fall off again. The girls thought it was hilarious.

They were laughing and stopping to pick up her shoes for about the third time when my sister Amy noticed a bee fly out of one of the shoes and buzz away. Then we noticed several dead wasps on the ground right under the end of AJ's teeter-totter seat. Then another bee came out of the bottom of the seat.

There was a hornet's nest inside the see-saw.

We whisked the girls off the toy and into the car as quickly as we could. Meanwhile, my dad was tipping the see-saw up and down and trying to figure out where the nest was. There were several small holes in the bottom of each seat, and the bees had entered that way and built a nest inside the hollow toy.

The wasps were swarming around, confused with the movement of their home. They seemed really disoriented and couldn't find the entrance to the nest since the see-saw had been moved. I was just glad they didn't come swarming out and straight up the girls' dresses while they were playing.

I'm really glad AJ's shoes fell off before the bees recovered enough from the first shock of having their home moving and clunking around, and decided to attack. We probably wouldn't have noticed the bees before someone got stung if the shoes hadn't fallen off.

A mass of bee stings would NOT be what we needed right after AJ had to get 4 vaccinations. The shots were bad enough. I hate wasps.



MM wouldn't be happy unless I included a photo of her new shoes too. We picked up a pair of new (to us) shoes for each of the girls at Value Village last week. The girls are very excited about their new shoes. They're easy for them to get on and off by themselves (AJ's are clogs and MM's have velcro straps), which is a huge selling point.

The challenge is getting MM to remove her new shoes when it's time to go to bed.