The other day I received an email from Ollie’s school. It turns out that the class had taken a walk in the park, and had unfortunately stumbled full-force into a nest of yellow jackets. What had started as a fun little nature walk ended in 21 screaming 3 year olds, covered in bees.

Can you imagine the carnage of an entire preschool class being swarmed by bees? Kids running, kids screaming, kids crying, dogs and cats, living together…mass hysteria. I doubt bedlam is too strong a word.

In the email, one of the children was quoted as saying “They can’t talk so they tell us with their stings!” “WHY DO THEY HAVE TO TELL US SO MANY TIMES?” I assume she continued. All in all, 9 kids were stung. Needless to say, the school nurse was a little busy that day.

Oliver was one of the children who was stung. Apparently a bee or two had crawled up the leg of his shorts and gotten him a few times on the inner thigh. (!!) Of course, it took the nurse awhile to realize he’d been stung, since he was just sitting there smiling and generally in a good mood; she thought he’d been sent down with the other kids by mistake. That boy and his ridiculous pain tolerance (remember how he forgot to mention even once his chronic ear infections?) By the time Sara picked him up from school he had already forgotten which leg had been stung, and he insists that the red welts are “mosquito bites”.

By the time I got home from work, the whole event was a distant memory.

“Did anything happen at school today?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Did you go for a walk to the park?”
“Yeah, we did.”
“…and did anything happen while you were at the park?” (You know, such as you and 20 of your classmates being swarmed and stung repeatedly, while everybody ran around and screamed like some kind of a cartoon?)
“Yeah!” said Ollie excitedly, “I found a stick!”

Oh well. Better than being traumatized I guess. Despite living through the Titanic-level disaster scenario of 21 children covered in yellow jackets, his outlook on bees hasn’t changed a bit.