Seventeen bugs died before I abandoned my original subject and started typing this column instead.

Ha! Two at once! Make that nineteen!

I hate bugs. Hate them with the–dangit! I missed–same searing hatred my husband reserves for small, screeching birds. Geoff’s hatred results from once being trapped for weeks in a house with an ill-tempered parakeet. My hatred results from being a bug magnet all of my life.

Curses! Another one escaped my clapped hands of death. 

I don’t know if there’s a difference between fruit flies and gnats, but whatever these are, they’re driving me mad. They seem drawn to my eyes or, even worse, when I try to speak, a cloud of them heads for my mouth. Who cares if they’re free protein? They’re disgusting. And they tickle.

During a quick run to the kitchen, I complained about the gnats to my husband. Since he and I currently share our home’s only working computer, I thought it seemed likely that he’d noticed the bugs. Unfortunately, Geoff suffers from a visual impairment that prevents him from being able to see dirt, empty ice cube trays, kitten-sized dust balls, and bugs.

Wanting a witness to the growing swarm in my office, I called for my kid. In that lightning fashion of hers (better tracked by calendar than stopwatch), by the time she steps through the doorway, the whole extended gnat family is gone. Just like that. Poof. 

“I don’t see any bugs,” she says.

“They probably died of old age,” says I. 

No sooner had she returned to her bedroom when the swarm returned. A dizzying cloud of tiny black bugs. 

Likely attracted by our frequently replenished summer stock of fresh fruits and vegetables, the gnats multiply seem to multiply overnight-a problem I don’t recall ever once having when we ate nothing but junk.  

I’m not a selfish host. I’d have been okay with sharing our bounty with a bug or two, but apparently one techno-savvy bug tweeted about our somewhat casual housekeeping tendencies and the next thing we knew, they were holding gnat class reunions in our kitchen. 

Ha!

Twenty!

I have blood-lust now.

It’s enough that the outdoor bugs, mostly mosquitoes, had gotten so bad I’ve become a prisoner in my own home. No matter how much bug repellent I douse myself with, there’s something about me that transforms Deet into A-1 Steak Sauce for bugs. 

The insect problem has me at wit’s end, my paranoia increasing to the point where I wonder if the gnats and mosquitoes aren’t working in concert. The gnats want the house to themselves. The mosquitoes want their own personal blood bank.

Something about me attracts bugs. I suspect I’m invited to outdoor events because of my gift for drawing the ardor of every insect within a 20-mile radius to such a degree that all other guests are free to enjoy hours of bug-free time while I slap myself silly.

Attempting to reduce the bug population one mosquito and gnat at a time. 

Sometimes a thing happens so fast you aren’t sure you’ve seen it at all. This was one of those times. 

Crows aren’t generally known for being kind and loving. Their reputation leans more toward being one of nature’s more notorious pranksters, recognized for their cunning intelligence, but not their maternal affection for babes not their own. (They generally display their lack of affection by eating those babes.)

So when I saw a momma crow feed a baby cowbird, I was stunned. It first fed its own wing-flapping, lookalike youngster, then a few seconds later, turned and fed the much smaller baby cowbird that sat right beside it. 

If you aren’t a bird person, this likely means little to you, but it was shocking to see a bird as brainy as a crow being taken in by an avian brood parasite. (That’s the technical term, not my own. I’d prefer “creative parenting opportunist.”)

Cowbirds are one of the most common avian brood parasites. The expectant parasite mother bird will find a nest with eggs and, after removing one of the host’s eggs, will lay one of her own to replace it. Since her offspring generally has a shorter egg incubation period than that of the bird she has chosen, her egg will often hatch first, giving her baby a head start on growth, basically guaranteeing their survival over the others since her babe will be bigger and more developed, and can grab more food than the others.

It would be easy to think ill of the cowbird for being a lazy and irresponsible parent, but their resilience is something to admire. Consider for a moment what Momma Cowbird goes through: You’re in labor and know delivery is immanent, yet before you can give birth, you must first find an untended cradle, remove the baby, give birth to your own offspring, then recover enough to leave before the mother returns.

My parents once raised a cowbird whose mother had been desperate enough to leave her largish egg in a tiny Phoebe’s nest. When it was just a few days old, the big baby fell out, breaking its leg in the fall. Squeaky, as he was eventually named, didn’t heal well enough to support his bum leg, so he could never fly. (Actually, he could fly. He just couldn’t land. When he did, he kind of pitched forward onto his face.) Instead of going free, Squeaky ended up spending his entire long life in a cage, eating ice cream with vigor and singing in a voice that sounded like air being released from a pinched-off balloon.

So even though I was familiar with cowbirds and their con-artist ways, it was still surprising to witness an intelligent crow going along with the guise. The charity of that crow struck me as uncharacteristic, so I went online to research the parenting instinct of crows.

And one of the first things I ran across was a youtube video of a kitten raised by a wild crow.

Talk about an impressive parasitic parent! Holy crow! Apparently the mother cat interrupted her labor long enough to find a crow’s nest, toss out one of the babies, and substitute a kitten in its place.

Or maybe the crow just happened across the orphaned kitten in some less remarkable way. I have a tendency to opt for the drama.

Regardless, the video shows the crow collecting bugs, which it feeds to the kitten. The pair is clearly affectionate, and even after the kitten is adopted by humans, the crow continues to visit each day, cawing at the window until the kitten comes out.

I used to work with a woman named Norma whose dad once raised a crow. She told me how, when her dad got old, he and the crow would go for walks together up the gravel road that he lived on. She said they walked at the same pace.

Even though I never met him, that’s an image I love. And old man and his bird. Side by side. Gravel road.

The only downside was what happened to Norma’s sister. Tragically tossed from her cradle by a mother crow. 

Most people take gifts to graduation parties. We left with one.

My husband, daughter and I had gone to a high school graduation party for Katie Harman, the oldest daughter of our friends, Gale and Jodi. While there, Celeste spotted a baby rabbit in a Build-A-Bear box and asked permission to hold it.

That same rabbit now sits at my feet, meticulously removing chipped polish from one of my toes.

My only prior experiences with rabbits were limited to the times I’d raised hurt or orphaned wild bunnies-two times with success, and two times I failed. Since those weren’t meant to be pets, they were deliberately not tamed so they could go free. Those wild rabbits seemed to reach adulthood almost overnight, and in no time, they were out on their own, without so much as a card at holidays. Not even at Easter.

My time with those long ago rabbits didn’t prepare me for the charms of our wily new hare. I expected that Winnie (a name inspired by the Poo) wouldn’t be much more than a cute little pellet producer, but she’s surprised me by being interesting, affectionate, and easily hypnotized. Scratch her nose for just a few seconds and she’s instantly pose-able.

Fortunately, she also seems not to be too easily embarrassed.

Friends were amused when I announced our new addition (which I like to think of as a “hare extension”), and several shared stories of their experiences with rabbits.

One friend, Leigh Shell, warned of the danger of napping with a rabbit. I figured the only danger in sleeping with a bunny would have something to do with that multiplication rumor that rabbits get blamed for, but Leigh told about a woman she knew who used to have hair down to her ankles until, “she woke up one morning, spooning with her pet rabbit, and realized she now looked like an Ewok. Had to go to the beauty salon to get it fixed cuz the rabbit had eaten most of it off.”

Another friend, Krista Fink, said she had many rabbits when she was a kid, and two of their family’s rabbits had the run of the neighborhood.

“They used to annoy me sometimes, especially when we’d play spotlight or hide and seek,” said Krista. “I was always the easiest to find because there would be this big white rabbit with glowing red eyes following me. It was impossible to hide with her trailing me.” 

When Krista claimed their rabbits would come when someone called them, I laughed. 

A rabbit that knew its name? That came when you called it? Uh-huh. Sure. I mean-come on. There’s a reason that when something is stupid we call it hare-brained. Rabbits are cute, but there’s not much going on in those wee bunny brains. Everybody knows that.

Or so I thought.

Winnie began recognizing her name from just a week or so out, and she faithfully comes when you call her. By the end of the first month, she was litter trained. And by the end of the second month, we learned there are reasons for keeping rabbits in cages that have little to do with their poo. Namely, cords.

Don’t worry. She’s fine. And our phone service is up and running again, after a nice, quiet weekend of wondering how we were so lucky to not once be interrupted by calls.

It was a gift to us, from our graduation rabbit.

This time next year, I’ll be the Mom of a teenager.

A wise friend who has college-age children has been trying to prepare me for what she claims is the inevitable. She swears the teen years are awful so it’s easier on parents when our offspring leave home.

I’m not sure if I hope that she’s right, or hope that she’s wrong.

I can’t imagine ever being excited about the prospect of Celeste leaving home, although perhaps I could if I knew it meant she’d be taking a half-dozen animals with her. By the time she’s old enough, though, our house probably won’t seem as much like the zoo it does now as it will a home for geriatric and intellectually disadvantaged creatures.

I dread the day when it’s no longer cute little animals that follow her home, but cute not-little boys.

Even though that worry is still a few years away, Geoff has already been strategizing with one of his friends, who also has a 12-year-old daughter. They’ve come up with a number of inventive techniques for putting the fear into potential suitors, with their shared goal being no second dates.

The many intricacies of parenting fascinate me. It seems you never stop learning and adjusting, tweaking your technique or plan of attack. Just when you think you have it all figured out, along comes a new phase, fear, or dilemma.

From the time Celeste was an infant, I’ve been keeping track of some of the parenting lessons I’ve learned. For instance, I once wrote, “I learned that my girl can nap through the roar of a vacuum cleaner circling her crib, but the sound of my head hitting a pillow will wake her 100% of the time.”

When she was three:  “I’ve learned a three-year-old needs a space of her own. And I’ve learned that most often, that space is in my bed.”

As a preschooler, she taught me, “When playing hide and seek with a little one, if it’s taking an unusually long time for them to find you, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve found a clever hiding place. It means your playmate found something more interesting to do and neglected to tell you.”

When Celeste was seven or eight, she found my list of lessons and added a few of her own. Among hers were, “The taste of hair gel will not wash off someone’s toothbrush, no matter how much soap you use.” And, “You can’t hatch an egg from the refrigerator. Mothers already know this, but some are mean enough allow you to carry one around for ages anyway.”

She also learned that mothers will get really upset if you show company where she hid all the junk that used to be on the kitchen counter just before they arrived.

When Celeste was 9, I learned I could take advantage of her competitive streak and get housework done at the same time by setting a timer and betting her that she couldn’t finish a certain chore before it went off.

I also learned that when a competitive child is in a hurry to get the kitchen floor shiny clean, but she can’t find the Mop N Glo, she might consider Pledge an adequate substitute.

Sometime early in her 10th year, I learned the importance of making certain a child who has been asked to load and start the dishwasher understands the difference between Cascade and ordinary Dawn dish detergent. (Although I also learned that several feet of Dawn suds can remove the residual Pledge ice-rink effect on the floor.)

 Age 11 was a fairly calm, quiet year, and as the days dwindled down before she turned 12, I was struggling to come up with even one lesson to add to my list.

Until the answer appeared right at my feet.

Unfortunately, my feet were going down the stairs in the dark at the time. And Celeste had left a stack of newly purchased school supplies on the stairs, intending to carry them up. She just hadn’t yet. In spite of numerous trips up and down. 

Resulting in my trip down those last few stairs being on my backside.

The lesson?

That children can be a real pain in the butt.