Fireflies or lightning bugs

it doesn't matter...

Tonight Elizabeth experienced the joy of seeing these little critters for the first time.  After her bath Nathan and I took her outside around 8:30 to catch a few in her bug box.  He and I ran around the yard chasing them down and called out when we saw one close by.  I have to admit, we might have had more fun than she did, but she was still pretty excited when we put one in her hand or when they produced their bioluminescence.  She would say with a little dance - "I got a bug, I got a bug".

This event reminded me of when I was little going out in our backyard with my sister and her boyfriend, Richard, and catching hundreds of fireflies.  We would put them in mason jars in our fridge (despite my mother's objections) to put them to sleep - really just slow their metabolism.  After we got a significant amount of them, my sister would mail them off to a research company for what I recall being 1 cent a bug to collect the enzyme luciferase to use in experiments. Little did I know that one day I would be using that same enzyme in experiments while I was in graduate school.  Those were fun memories. Heres to Elizabeth experiencing the same vivid summer firefly memories.