The Story of the Summer Bee Drama

I love being outside. I always have. In fact, I think that it was during my senior year of college that I went thru a phase of sleeping outside on the back porch. (I don't think that lasted very long!) ...Anyways, my kids love being outside too. Some of our favorite days include exploring out back, riding bikes, painting outside, searching for critters, and other sorts of outdoor adventures. The thing about living in Macon, Georgia is that you can pretty much play outside all year long. It's blazing hot in the summer months and the mosquitoes are terrible...but we still go outside and just set up our own little mini-water park in the front yard (there are less mosquitoes in the front...so we red-neck it and set up the pool on the driveway!)

Well, while Fred and I were away on a student mission trip at the end of July, my mom came to watch the kids at our house. They did all kinds of fun things together and stayed pretty busy. All was well until the day before Fred and I returned home. Joshua was playing in the next yard over with a neighbor's grandson, while mom and our neighbor were standing out back. They called the two boys back to our yard and before they knew it, both boys were running as fast as their little legs could go and screaming their heads off. It took a minute for the two grandmas to realize what was going on, but once the boys got close enough- it was obvious. One of the boys had disturbed a yellow jacket nest. And my poor, dear baby was covered in yellow jackets. He was, of course, screaming hysterically while my mom fearlessly ripped his clothes off and got him upstairs into a baking soda bath as quickly as possible. Both mom and Joshua got stung 6-8 times by those awful little suckers:( Our neighbors were great: bringing mom Benedryl and checking on her and J several times (mom had a reaction when she was a little girl...she actually called dad that night and said something like "Call me in the morning. If I don't answer, call an ambulance." ...nothing says "sleep well, dear" like that!!!!) Thankfully, mom waited til the whole ordeal was past and Joshua was fine to call me...otherwise, I'm pretty sure my trip would have been cut a day short:) You know, you can't hear something like that without immediately replaying that terrible scene from My Girl.

So, we got home the next evening and everything seemed fine. Joshua had perfectly recovered; you couldn't even tell where he'd been stung. We headed out the next day for our Prosser family beach trip and spent an amazing week living outside in the sand, surf, and at the pool. We got home the next week and as we saw friends that we'd missed for 2 whole weeks, we recounted Joshua's tale of being attacked by bees. Joshua usually loves this sort of thing: telling a great story, seeing the reaction of his audience, receiving the praise of such bravery. However- it backfired on me big-time! Apparently, somewhere along the way, my little boy became deathly afraid of ALL things creepy crawly. We are talking gnats, ants, spiders, ANYTHING that was a bug, he was seriously afraid of! It was terrible. He refused to go outside for over a month and even got upset when we had to park far away at church or at a store. There were times that he even begged for us to carry him over the step and into the van inside of the garage!

My sweet boy was seriously traumatized. It was a good thing to go through, really. It allowed our family A LOT of conversation about trusting God. We prayed with Joshua, we recounted Scripture and accounts of courage from the Bible. We talked about God's goodness and purpose in creating bees. We read books about bees (and every other type of bug!) We talked about how fun outside is and how thankful we are for God's beautiful creation. I could tell all along, that there was a struggle going on in my little guy. He SO wanted to trust...but his fear was holding him back. And after, like I said, over a month of spending mornings and afternoons cooped up indoors, we went to St. Louis for a week and Joshua got over it. As we were praying one day, at the end he said "and thank You, God for bees." wow! That was huge. Joshua is still a bit skittish around bees (I don't blame him!!!!) but we are back to a normal routine of playing outside. We will probably eventually be able to have more conversations about trusting the LORD from all this... but for now, we've decided that it's best to just not talk about it and be VERY thankful that we are past the Summer Bee Drama:)

*These are pictures of me and the kids missing an entire wedding ceremony that Fred officiated...because it was outside. We instead, spent an hour sitting in the van watching Curious George until the reception!