The Snake Hunter loses a tooth!

Did I catch your attention with that title? Before I start, let me say that I have tried to teach my children to be compassionate to all of God's creatures and that you shouldn't kill any animal unless you plan to eat it. (We're not vegetarians-in case you can't tell!) Well, sometimes they listen and sometimes they don't. Yesterday, Connor and #1W were playing out in the neighborhood when they spotted a snake "sidewinding" along. Of course, once they noticed it they couldn't leave it alone. Connor said the snake was green and about a foot and a half long so they decided that it was a grass snake. Even though he knew that a grass snake was not poisonous he decided that they had to kill it. He (I'm not sure about the part that #1W had in this-according to Connor it was all him but I don't want to steal her thunder) said that he hit it with a stick which hurt the back of the snake so that all the snake could do was move it's head. Then he took a piece of a brick and hit it in the neck because he "couldn't just leave it there to die". This doesn't take into account the fact that the snake would have been moving along just fine without the help of Connor's stick! Anyway, the snake was dead and Connor said he is the one who killed it. He came home and was so excited that you would have thought he had just slayed a dragon! We had to get the full recount of exactly what happened and I would say that we only heard it, oh, about 20 times before he went to bed. :) He also had to look up the snake in his Okefenokee Joe book and determined that it was really a grass snake.

Mike wanted me to e-mail Connor's teacher to forewarn her that she would be hearing snake tales all day since Connor is naturally just a little bit talkative anyway. (That is sarcasm in blog language, in case you couldn't pick up on it.) I decided to wait and tell her this morning but lucky for her, she was absent today. I also decided this morning to be a semi-slacker Mom and take my children by Burger King for breakfast since we've been up late every night watching the Olympics. As Connor was eating his breakfast in the car his tooth just pops out. That just adds to the excitement of the day and the occasion for more stories since Garrett and I had to hear the replay of how he bit into his bacon wrap and his tooth just came right out. The bad part is that now Connor only has one tooth in the middle of his top row of teeth and it is huge in comparison to his baby teeth. Hopefully, the new teeth will grow in soon. All in all, it was 2 days filled with excitement here at the zoo...... with the Snaggletoothed Snakehunter!