Potato Bug

So this morning while Sydney took her nap, Lexi and I went outside to play and pull weeds(which, to a kid I've discovered pulling weeds is like playing! Yay!) I'm really glad I was wearing gloves (in order to squish the unsuspecting but grody looking spiders that randomly run out) because then THIS came up out of the ground, like some freaky alien ant/bee/grasshopper.

It's called a potato bug, Jerusalem cricket, spawn of Satan, bald devil fetus and earth fetus - to name a few nicknames! They are basically pretty harmless, live under ground, and are omnivores, so both bugs and plants are on the menu.
So what did I do when I pulled up the weed and the potato bug came crawling out? What any normal (relatively) mom would do - I called for Lexi to come and look at it while I tried to keep it from disappearing back under the overgrowth and then potentially dig itself far far away from me! Lexi stared at it with a mix of interest and revulsion, but wouldn't get close enough to really look at it, so I ran into the house and grabbed a mason jar to trap it. Then she really looked at it and man was it interesting! Those things are so freaky looking, but I don't want her to have bug phobias, so I introduce bugs at every possible opportunity, along with teaching her how to squish the bad ones.
All of this leads to my story with the potato bug when I was 16. One summer I worked for a couple in our ward at their ranch, doing whatever they had for me - weeding, cleaning, hoeing, etc. Basically manual labor at its finest! One day I was weeding up this big patch of ground, when my hoe brought to light a potato bug! It wasn't like the picture, this one had been underground so long it turned into an albino, so it was very pale and HUGE, like 4 inches long I kid you not. Just like Lexi, I stared at it with fascination and revulsion, until I decided I needed to get back to work, and it was just going to keep grossing me out. So I chopped at it with my hoe, but it only separated the front from the main body and here is the super gross part - the head turned on itself and started ripping the body (the part with stripes) apart with these ginormous mandibles!! I almost threw up, but then just chopped it into little bits (sadistic I know, but it went against the laws of nature!) and covered it with dirt and went on about my day - not to really be thought about until we found another one this morning. To be nice, we let it go and covered it up with dirt, partly because I don't want Lexi to be sadistic and squish bugs just because they look gross, and also because I didn't want to throw up if it ate itself like the last time! Lexi then ran off to her sandbox and I decided I was done with weeding for the morning.