It’s bug season in Florida, when you can find every type of creepy-crawly imaginable starts creeping and crawling along the vegetation. Yesterday morning, we found a whole bush full of weird little fuzzy red insects under the picnic table. I searched all my bug-books, as well as the web, but couldn’t find them.

On our exploration of Mead Gardens, the bug parade continued. My oldest had a black grasshopper with an orange stripe ride his shoulder for a good fifteen minutes. The two of them really bonded, and  he was quite annoyed when I told him it was better for the grasshopper to put him back in the grasses where we found him.

As we were walking along the boardwalk over the marsh, a purple dragonfly zoomed a jagged circle around us before disappearing into the greenery.

“There sure are a lot of bugs,” my youngest said.

“Yeah,” his older brother said. “And I think we discovered a new kind. Those ones under the picnic table? No one’s ever seen those before. Daddy looked.”

“I think I probably just didn’t find them. There are people out there who spend their whole lives studying bugs. They’re called Entymologists.”

My oldest raised his eyebrow at me, clearly not knowing whether I was teasing or not.

“Antymologist?” the five-year old chimed in. “I know why they’re called that – because they study ants!”

I laughed. “It’s not ‘ant.’ It’s  ‘ent’. The word has two parts. An ‘ologist’ is someone who studies something, and an ent is…” I trailed off. The only definition of Ent that I know is a walking tree.

“An antymologist!” the little guy said. “Someone who studies ants!”

I have to admit it. It does make more sense.