Honduras Critters

Today is going to be my "critter day".  A lot of what I did today - devotions in the morning, circle & breakfast with the little girls, classes at school, lunch with the little girls, playing with them on the playground, supper and bath time with the little girls - didn't change...so I will take you through my day in terms of the critters around me, since today was an extra special day for that!

We have a mouse in the house!  As she was making coffee this morning, Kimberly found that a mouse had gotten into her oatmeal, and had traveled all along the cupboard of our kitchen.  I guess we'll have to be more careful about what's left out on the cupboards and what gets put away into the refrigerator.

I'm not too terribly worried about mice (since Alina & I normally eat with the kids, so we don't have much food here in the house), but ants just disgust me!  So I'm very thankful that nothing sweet has been left out for ants to find their way into the house.  We have all sizes of ants down here, tiny ones that I 'tweek' off of the kitchen table each morning...only about 3-5 of them each day); then we have the slightly larger ants that if I didn't know better, I'd say they have razor sharp teeth.  They make these enormous ant hills in the grass and if you're not careful and stand on one, they swarm up your leg and bit like crazy.  It hurts and it takes a while to get them all swatted off.  Then there are these super-sized black ants.  Think about our big black ants back in Wisconsin and then multiply that size by at least 5!  I don't think these ants are harmful, but they just look disgusting.  They are currently crawling all around the outside of our apartment.

So on the way to the little girls' house this morning, Alina was in front of me and jumped and let out a half-sigh, half-scream.  I asked her what was up and she asked if the "thing" in front of her was a tarantula.  It was!...but it was dead.  It was still all in tact, not sure why it died.  It was fun to see her reaction, although she got over it fairly quickly.  I let her know that now she won't be too terribly shocked when she sees a live one.

Bees - they're all over the place, trying furiously to build nest after nest which get taken down by the girls and boys of the houses.  Earlier this week, one of the big girls (Daniela) put some paper on the end of a stick and set it on fire to burn a bees nest down in the little girls' house.  We had quite a big nest going outside Kimberly's bedroom window, but I believe it was taken down by either Julieth or Veronica this past weekend because it's no longer there.  Yet there are still a few bees clinging to the spot on the patio ceiling where the nest once was.

Termites - Alina & I found a termite nest started between the slats of our bedroom window.  We're not too worried (for ourselves) since it's on the outside and termites go after wood, not humans.  But every once in a while some bug comes to the termite nest, looking for some delicious termites and gets pretty loud as its wings flap against the window.

Grasshoppers - These are also much bigger than what you'd see in the states.  Generally they're 6-8 inches long 3-4 inches tall (and keep in mind that I'm a mathematics teacher, so these measurements are fairly accurate!) and either green or a reddish color.  The first one we saw was out at the farm.  Alina jumped and just wanted to keep on walking.  We later saw a dead one outside our apartment - again, it grossed her out.  The neighbors across from us had a grasshopper get INTO their apartment, so they kept it as a pet until they moved out...then moved it outside into the hallway areas.  I think we've seen 2 since, and she's getting more & more desensitized to them.

The first night we moved into this apartment we saw a BIG cockroach hiding in the upper corner of our living room, close to the ceiling.  We haven't seen it since, but today a smaller sized cockroach crawled out from under the chair I was sitting in at school while we were reading through a Magic Tree-house book in Spanish.  One of the kids killed it right away, and we all laughed.

Last night Kimberly found a moth in her bedroom that was white with all of these colorful designs on it.  I have never seen a moth like it!  She took a picture and we're hoping that the camera was able to zoom in on it closely without too many problems.  Most moths here are huge, like the size of bats.  They just cling to walls like most moths do back at home...just much bigger and when they're flying they make you think of bats.

A few days ago, Alina found a praying mantis at the little girls' house.  Also there are these TINY snails that crawl around on the vegetation, very cute in a snail-sort of way.  One of them was just "booking it" and reminded me of the snail in the movie Monsters University that I had taken Max & Noah to see.

So, there's a glimpse into the critter life here in Honduras!  Hope you've enjoyed & will get back to a regular blog tomorrow.