It MOVED!

My oldest daughter, V, has always been a bit of a conspiracy nut, and, from the time she could talk, she was obsessed with aliens, vampires, ghosts, and an assortment of other paranormal topics.

My youngest daughter, O, is three years younger than her and has always been the voice of reason and logic.

Their different ways of viewing the world have never been as apparent, or insane, as when V was seven, and O was four, and V found a butterfly for her bug collection.

V had been collecting and pinning bugs for about a week, mostly finding them already dead in our yard, or during walks. Occasionally we would catch something alive and euthanize it with rubbing alcohol fumes.



On this morning, we were walking home from the library when V found a dying Painted Lady butterfly, and decided to bring it home to wait until it naturally "passed on" before making it her newest trophy.



The butterfly had stopped twitching by the time we got home, so V decided to put it in the bug box with the rest of her collection. My attempts to tell V that the butterfly might not be completely dead yet were met with looks of pity, as if I had no idea what I was talking about.

A few hours later, the girls decided they wanted to look at the bugs we already had, so V carefully got the collection down from her shelf, and slowly opened the lid, to avoid damaging anything, which startled the still nearly-dead butterfly and caused it to move some.

At this point O, being a child of reason, and knowing V's tendency to be a bit over-excitable decided to take the situation into her own hands.

This did not go over well with V, who was now more freaked out than ever.

It was about two days before V would get rid of the now definitely-dead vampire butterfly, and only after pestering O into apologizing to the butterfly's spirit, so it wouldn't haunt our house.