Mom of the Year

Yeah, that's me.  Sacrifice, dedication, putting others first. Check.  Even if it makes ya wanna hurl.  Repeatedly.  We are talking about worm catching.  Anyone who knows me well knows how much I HATEHATEHATE worms.  Spiders?  They are gross.  I don't love them. Black Widows?  I am afraid of them.  WORMS?  They are the grossest creatures that crawl on (well, on and under) the face of the earth.

Our sandbox is right by a couple of sprinklers and the kids never remember to put the lid back on it.  Which results in it filling up with water.  And becoming a perfect breeding ground for microbes and slimy stuff.  The kids were outside in the backyard today trying to drain out all the water from the sandbox.   They saw some little red squiggly-wigglies and thought they might be mosquito larvae.  So, being the amazing, educational, biological person I am (even if it involves worms) I hopped on Google and did a search for "tiny red worms".  Don't worry about the fact that yesterday I was nauseated all day thanks to a stomach virus and have had some remaining intermittent nausea all day.  Nevermind the fact that seeing 100 pictures of "tiny red worms" while I can smell my dinner cooking in the oven makes me totally wanna hurl.  Nevermind that I am totally classically conditioning (Pavlov anyone?) myself to feel sick whenever I smell brownies because I am baking some while I blog and I post pictures of little red worms.  BLECK.  And mosquito larvae.  We found them in the sandbox too.

Bloodworms on the left.  Mosquito Larva on the right.

Thanks to the unlimited information on Google, while learning how to kill mosquito larvae I learned that goldfish eat them.  And that people buy freeze dried bloodworms to give to their fish for a treat becaue they love to eat them. (YUM!)  So then I got the bright idea to let the kids catch the creatures and feed them to Goldie (our bionic goldfish that we have had since May 2010).
   

It was REALLY fun sifting through all the murky water to try to extract the worms. 
Especially in my kitchen with dinner cooking.

After doing this I kind of regret it--partially because of the gag-factor and because there wre probably diseases in the sandbox that we have now introduced into our tank.  Goldie DID enjoy the worms.  She ate them right up.  I HAVE been saying though that I'd be "ok" if Goldie decided to go belly up (finally) because as it happens with many pets, I have kind of gotten tired of feeding, training and cleaning up after her.  I will feel kind of bad though if she dies because of the bloodworm treats we gave her.

Watching Goldie to see if she will eat the worms.

Don't you think this should earn me the Mom of the Year award or SOMETHING????!!  For providing my children with impromptu biology lessons and doing it in my VERY kitchen?  (With WORMS!) I was thinking it is really too bad that the science fair isn't coming up because I learned on Google how to raise your own bloodworms.  Total science project right?   Sorry if I grossed you out. I have to publish this now and go delete all the worm pictures that are in my folder.