Margaux and I spent a little time this morning at Oklahoma State University’s Insect Adventure, a sort of petting zoo for insects and arachnids. M was completely taken by the bugs and had a ball with her new entomologist friends Zoe and Xandra. Here are pictures of some of the fun.

This is M with a Madagascar hissing cockroach. You have to get them irritated to hear the hiss, but then it’s quite audible.

This was another giant roach, called a pepper roach:

This is a mealworm, a larval form of a darkling beetle. Child has serious love for bugs.

This is a vineagaroon, also called a whip-tailed scorpion, though it’s not technically a scorpion and doesn’t have a stinger. Still pretty creepy, though.

Probably her favorite insect today was something called the Thorny Devil Walking Stick, a kind of super-sized walking stick bug. (Though not the largest they had. That would be the Jungle Nymph, a freakish large green thing. They weren’t passing around today because it was in a bad mood and they didn’t want kiddos losing digits.

But the thorny devil was mellow and happy. It clung to M’s shirt and walked around her shoulders and backpack while she toured the various displays.

When we got home, all those insects had made us hungry. Margaux asked for insect-themed lunch, so we had tarantula and mealworms (aka avocado with carrot sticks and blueberries and rolls of turkey with blueberries.

M finished lunch with a butter-mint, which she called an “egg sac.”