It's all a matter of perspective...

When Alyssa and Elizabeth were little--maybe 2 and a half--we bought them all sorts of flash cards and would spend hours learning the alphabet, numbers, colors, and other such important things in the life of a 2 year old. We had one set that was animals, and we told the girls that when they learned all the animals in the deck we would take them to the San Antonio zoo. We figured there were something like 100 animals and it would take months for them to get them ALL exactly right, but we were very wrong. They learned all those animals in a record time of something like 2 weeks. We couldn't hold off taking them to the zoo, but we didn't have the money or the time (being in the middle of summer school) to take them to San Antonio, so we compromised and went to the Houston zoo.

They were so excited about going to the zoo and could talk about nothing but seeing all the animals from their cards in real life. Chatter chatter chatter all the way to Houston to meet David's family who got in their car and drove with us all the way to the zoo. Chatter chatter chatter all the way to the zoo.

Then we walked in the gate to the zoo and those girls shut up immediately, clinged to David and Sam's hands and were terrified of every single animal they saw. They knew the lions were going to jump over the 30 foot gap between their den and the 20 foot high fence and eat them. The elephants would stomp them to death. The giraffe would wring them to death in their long, long neck. We couldn't get them excited about seeing one single animal in that zoo, so we left early and went home listening to chatter chatter chatter all the way back about all the amazing animals they saw at the zoo.

About a week later, the girls were playing on our tiny fenced patio in their wagon when they started screaming bloody murder that there was a snake that was going to eat them alive and kill them with one single bite of its monstrous fangs. David and I ran to the sliding door and yanked it open to discover our terrified children screaming and pointing at an earth worm, which was curled into a pretty S shape that looked exactly like the snake in the flash cards--all the way down to size and color.