Summer Magic: Catching Fireflies, Junebugs on a String & Widdle Wobsters
Fireflies are little bits of summertime magic.
Yes, I know…bioluminescence, chemical reaction, blah blah blah. I reject that reality and substitute my own (10 points to you if you recognize that quote). Let’s just call them MAGIC!
Did you catch fireflies when you were little…or sleep with them in a mason jar as a nightlight? If you lived in the South you sure did. You might have even tied a string to a junebug’s leg and flown it around like a kite. REALLY. We do that stuff down here.
See? Also, it’s really hard to get a picture of a junebug flying on a thread. Spastic bugs and jumpy boys get in the way of well planned photo shoots. :)
Southern boys also visit local creeks and catch crawdads. The youngest used to call them ‘widdle wobsters’. Now we all call them widdle wobsters.
It does look like a little lobster, right?
I even made a cute digital scrapbook with Wendy’s new scrapbooking app that is perfect to send the Grandparents on Facebook.
Need some inspiration for catching fireflies, or making your own DIY firefly jar? Here are some of my favorite firefly pictures and links for firefly crafts:
Enjoy!
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firefly
Nearly an iconic representation of fireflies in a jar...I've never been able to track down who the photographer is.
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fireflies
Same thing for this photo, never attributed to original photographer. Let's see if we can harness the power of the interwebz to locate them!
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catching fireflies
The perfect mason jar, buzzing with glowing fireflies.
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fireflies up close
These dudes are just chillin'...fun to see them in a different "light"
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fake firefly in jar
Not lucky enough to live in a place where capturing fireflies is a possibility? This is a fun alternative.
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fake fireflies two
Hm. More faux fireflies. They glow like the real thing!
A big thanks to Wendy’s for sponsoring this campaign. Click here to see more of the discussion.
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When I was a kid, my siblings and I would catch fireflies and feed them to our pet frog…. you could see them light up inside his stomach!! Seems a bit morbid now, but back then we thought it was the coolest trick ever.
Sandy, I think I love you. :)
Funny thing is, I was always afraid of insects and bugs growing up (even a butterfly seemed rather repulsive!). Now that I have two kids, 6 and 4, all we seem to do on cool nights is catch fireflies and chase butterflies :) What a great way to document the simple things in life.
Widdle wobsters? That’s so cute! One of my favorite memories of childhood is getting a bunch of tadpoles and raising them into frogs. My mom let us keep them in a huge aquarium in our kitchen, and we’d watch them for hours. (So would our cats!) The largest tadpole ended up eating all the others, so we only ended up with one frog. :)
So cool! Living in San Francisco we don’t have fireflies, so i totally have bug envy. But we have our fair share of other critters, which we love to discover. Keeping those memories, that’s a good idea.
One of the great sadnesses of my life is that, growing up in CA, my kids don’t have access to lightning bugs. Some of my favorite summer memories as a kid involve catching lightning bugs.