Attack of the Yellowjackets

Today, my kids were playing outside the house (this is in Maryland) and managed to kick up a ruckus on the part of some yellowjackets. There was a lot of screaming and stinging and tiny things chasing much bigger things which ran away. Fleeing to the house brought some of the little critters inside, which induced more screaming and flailing about. Paramedics were called, but everyone seems okay.

As usual, Katerina took the worst of it, getting nailed something like ten times. Katerina seems always to be the one getting hurt. She's the one that managed to find out which slats in the porch railing were rotted through by falling through them to the concrete six feet below (lots of screaming that time, too, mostly by people other than Katerina.) Despite nothing more than scrapes that time, Katerina ended up with a broken arm after being pushed to the blacktop in school by a neighborhood boy (that liked her a lot and felt really bad about it afterwards.) She also got so excited about Christmas morning one year that she wouldn't eat and when Olympia and I arrived to announce it was time to open some presents, she passed out, scaring the heck out of everyone else (a bunch more screaming - there's a lot of that around her.)

She takes it well, though. When I called today, she answered the phone and said, "Fine," when I asked her how she was - never mentioning she'd been stung repeatedly. She also cried as much when the doctor took her cast off her arm as when it was broken. She said her cast had become her friend and didn't want to see it go. What a trooper!

I think they've figured out to stay away from the far back corner of the yard now.