Ok, so this is going to be a long story. It starts way back before Christmas. We always get a live tree because that's just what we do. So we go pick out a smallish tree in early December and it's unseasonably warm. Maddie finds a 'pinecone' on the tree and when it falls off, she asks me to hold it. I drop it in the pocket of my jacket where it lives for the next couple of weeks. It's not a pine cone at all, not sure what it is, but it doesn't even look like something natural . . . looks like a blob of that expanding foam that we use to seal waterfalls and plumbers use to fill in around pipes.
Sometime later, I find it in my pocket when I'm heading out the door and drop it on the counter where all the bills live. I pass by it several times in the next couple of months and each time think "What the heck is that stupid thing still doing here? Someone ought to throw it away."
Fast forward to this morning. I need to mail Mom's mail to her and pay Dad's bills and figure out if the insurance company and stock broker company have done anything about the problems I still have with them - plus need to transfer vehicle titles so need to spend a couple hours on hold with the DMV, etc. I figure I'd better gather up my bills too and they're sorta mixed in with Mom's and Dad's on the counter. So I have to sort the stuff on the counter into piles.
Well, as I start picking the major junk off the counter I realize there are hundreds, no thousands of tiny little 1/4" long bugs all over the counter. They aren't ants and they don't look like roaches . . . some of them are alive and moving. Start scooping them off with a piece of junk mail and there are more and more and more and more. Get the front part of the counter cleaned off and they're still coming from the back part.
I get my glasses and look really closely and discover that I've got thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of tiny little newly hatched Praying Mantises. Dig farther and find the egg case behind the pen tub and even more of the little buggers back there . . . . tens of thousands of them (maybe hundreds of thousands).
I put them all outside and then decided it probably would have been a good idea to save some for Maddie to take to school . . . it was her 'pine cone' after all.