"hey mommy! i have a great idea! we could try to find out what mushrooms are poisonous and what mushrooms you can eat by looking them up on the internet! let's do that! that's a great idea!"

and so, we managed to spend an hour (ava managed to spend an hour) on a website devoted to the classification of mushrooms. THOUSANDS of mushrooms to look at. click on the latin name, get a picture, all of the taxonomic details, plus a little picture of a fork and knife if it was edible and a skull and crossbones if not...

how completely random.

she was fascinated. of course, this was accompanied by "all mushrooms are poisonous unless you buy them in the store" on auto-repeat from mom. finally i said, "look. you don't even like mushrooms, so this is not an issue, right? no touching any mushrooms. ok?" and when she STILL asked about the mushrooms in our yard, i sat down and said "a poisonous mushroom and an ok mushroom can look exactly alike. the only difference is if you look at them under a microscope? since we are not mushroom-ologists, and we don't have a microscope, we are going to stick with the conservative approach here, ok? please don't argue with me anymore as to which mushrooms you think our fungi are."

"ok."

i know she does not want to eat them. but she loves the idea that there might be something so incredibly dangerous right there, in her dirt. now, if only we had a boa constrictor or a rattle snake or even maybe a wolf...that would be extra cool. bears? eh. no biggie. they eat blueberries.