Snakes

Mom and I were hanging out by the driveway at her house this past weekend when Mom decided to walk to the mailbox. Shortly after embarking, she called for me. I ran over to see that she was looking at a 3′ snake in the grass to her right. I ran back to the house and grabbed a couple cameras to shoot some video and take some photos.

Fast forward to tonight… Elise had her monthly church meeting tonight, so it was just me and the Zombie Eater. When Daddy is on nighttime duty, Maly usually requests that we watch videos on my computer. Said videos usually require that Maly be the star. Tonight I opened iPhoto and showed her the video of the snake that her grandma and I found on Saturday. She was very intrigued and asked, “can snakes bite you?”

Being the protective father that I am, I made sure that she was fully aware that, “YES! SNAKES WILL BITE YOU AND KILL YOU DEAD!” I said this only because we have rubber snakes that we keep in the backyard to ward off grackles and ninjas. Ninjas are afraid of snakes, just in case you weren’t aware.

Maly likes to play with her friend snakes by pretending to put lipstick on them and pet them.

To add emphasis, I did a quick YouTube search for snake bites to find this video:

12 seconds into the video and I successfully made my daughter deathly afraid of snakes. She hunkered next to me while clutching onto my arm.

I made sure to tell her that snakes are beautiful animals and deserve much respect (as indicated in the text at the end of the video). I then told her to be very careful around snakes and never to touch a real snake unless with her mom or dad.

Otherwise I could totally see her walking up to a rattlesnake in Cat Spring saying, “Ooooh, Daddy, he’s cute. Can I hold him?”