A Pupa? Supa-Dupa!*

If you ever need an earworm, call me.  I’ll be happy to give you one.  I have plenty.  Trust me.  Take mine.  Please.

I wake up with earworms rather than pick them up during the day, so they torture me from the moment my eyes open.  Sometimes it’s manageable.  A day of humming “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” from Greenday is a day I can live through.  Other days?  Holy hell, will someone PLEASE get “American Pie” out of my head already?

Sometimes listening to the song in full will erase it from my brain’s infinite play loop.  Other days, like the “American Pie” day, that only cranks up the volume in my head.

Now, bear with me for a moment while I appear to veer off course.  I promise, I’m not.

Earl went through a phase where the only show she would watch was Wonder Pets.  Wonder Pets is a veritable FONT (fount?  I should look that up, but meh) of earworms.  But she’s since grown up a bit and moved on to shows that actually have entire episodes based on an earworm.

I woke up this morning with “Fa La, La, Hey” stuck in my head for some absolute unknown reason.  Not ringing any bells?  In the episode, a caterpillar is distressed because something is wrong with his friend.  The Wonder Pets fly in and explain to the poor little caterpillar that his friend is turning into a butterfly.  There’s a song.  And in that song is the line, “He makes a real snug pupa.  A pupa?  Supa-dupa!”  That line?  Woke me up before my alarm.  Honest to God, I wanted to shoot something.

See, a couple of weeks ago, Earl came home from school with a caterpillar in a little cup.  “It’s gonna be a painted lady butterfly!” she explained.  We watched and watched while it slowly grew and eventually began to make it’s chrysalis.  Once that stage was done, we oh so carefully took the lid off the cup and attached it to the top of a little make-shift butterfly cage.  A couple of days later, the tape I had used failed and Earl went into conniptions.  “DID IT DID??  DID YOU KILL IT???”  While she was at school, I took some scissors and twine and very carefully and working only between heartbeats (“Please don’t let me have killed it.  Please don’t let me have killed it.  Please don’t let me have killed it.”) and reattached the lid with chrysalis to the wire-topped cage.

For the past few days, Earl has worried and worried and worried about it.  Seems some of the other caterpillars given out at the same time have already finished the morph.  This morning, that stupid song going through my head, I pulled her up to the cage.  “See?  Look right there.  See the little dots?  I think that’s part of a wing.  I think it’s about to come out!”

When she responded with “Super duper!” I did a double take and began to pray she hadn’t been cursed with the same earworm proclivity I have.  Because, honestly, THE TORTURE.

So I ran her to school, dropped the dogs off at camp to make someone else crazy for the day, and came home, humming “Fa La, La, Hey” as I came up the stairs.

This is what met me when I walked into the kitchen:

And the angels sang and the bells rang with joy and I squealed, “A butterfly?  Oh me, oh my!”

Fa laaaaaaa, laaaaaaa, heeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyy!

 

*TPO told me a while ago that she thought half of my Facebook updates should be Twitter updates instead.  “You Facebook too much.  USE.  TWITTER.  Fart in the wind, my friend.  Fart in the wind.”  Okay, so those may not have been her exact words, but that’s how I picture her saying it looking back to us both rocking away on my front porch having this conversation.  Well, here’s one for you, TPO.  I was going to post a Twitter status, but instead, I decided to BLOG IT.  Take THAT, smarty pants!