The Bad Bees (note, post originally written 10/23/06)...We had a very traumatic day on Saturday. We took the kids to the little Halloween festival at the Houston Arboretum & Nature Center. They were dressed in full Batman and Robin regalia and looking quite cute.

The trick-or-treating consisted of a walk through the forest on a nature trail and stopping at various stations for a little give-away or ecology lesson. As we came up to one of the stations, there was quite a crowd of people, so we decided to bypass. Sean and Trevor were ahead and I was directly behind Hayden. He was about a foot or less off to the side of the main path and as if in slow motion I saw him step on a hive of bees that was nestled into the ground. All at once, I saw a swarm coming out of the hive for my sweet boy. I told him to run but he only made it about 10 feet before the stinging started and he had the instinctive 3-year old reaction of freezing. So I screamed for Sean and he handed Trevor off to me and took Hayden and made a run for it.

We got a little ways down the path and paused to try to knock off as many bees as we could. By some miracle, Sean and Trevor weren't stung at all. Hayden ended up with 6 stings and I had 2 of them. With as many bees as landed on us, I really can't believe we made it through so well. But I haven't had a bee sting in probably 10-20 years and had forgotten how much they hurt. It's like the pain of a bad shot, but over and over and over again for hours.

But the worst part was that while we were trying to make our way out of the forest through clumps of people scattered on this trail, I tried to alert the people running this event to the fact that there was an active beehive in the trail and it could be seriously dangerous. Do you know what the response was? "Well, that's just nature for you" So if there was some wild tiger in the middle of the trail that snatched my baby and ate it, would that be "just nature" and you'd continue sending other people down the trail without any warning. At least you might ask people if they are allergic to bees and advise them to skip the trail. I had bigger fish to fry trying to take care of my own kid, but I told no less than 3 people about the problem and none of them seemed concerned or interested in taking any action.