This year, my wife and I have two girls going into ninth grade. The start of high school means getting up even earlier than ever, constant after-school activities, and homework I not only can't help with, but also don't even have a passing acquaintance with. (I know trigonometry and calculus are math-ish subjects, but I couldn't pick em out in a lineup.) But mostly, to me, the start of high school means bugs.

Around here, kids entering ninth grade are supposed to show up the first day of school with a bug collection consisting of 15 different bugs. They all have to be bugs, which means no spiders and no centipedes. And there can be no duplications -- one bee per collection.

Finally, and this part may or may not have been true, as it was passed through the kid information network, no stinkbugs allowed. (It seems that every house in our area is teeming with stinkbugs these days, something you might want to keep in mind if you are asked to visit here.)

It's kind of a rite of passage. The bug collection is probably a good indicator of what kind of kid a kid is. There are some kids who work all summer making sure that they have at least three times the number of required bugs, and by the time they get to school could be certified insecteotologists. (That, by the way, is a made-up word. If you didn't know that, really stay clear of helping your kids with homework.)

There are other kids who forget about the requirement until the last few days of summer, racing around like asylum patients with nets for three days.

There are, of course, the kids who don't do anything at all and show up the first day of school wondering why all the other kids brought Mason jars full of bugs with them.

Finally, of course, there are the worst kind of kids -- the ones who go to the pet store and get their parents to buy them bugs.

Our earlier experiences with the mandatory bug collection weren't so hot, so I was a little worried. Our middle son, who is now off in college, took the bug assignment so seriously that I was afraid he'd go off the deep end. Some people could play Russian roulette with less angst. While other kids spent August asking to go to the pool, and moaning about how bored they were, he spent hours pacing across the lawn, fretting about whether his most recent catch had enough distinguishing characteristics from his previous catch to distinguish it as a new bug.

When our twin 14-year-old daughters started catching bugs a few weeks ago, the biggest issue they faced was how to kill them. You are not allowed to crush the bugs, as they don't display properly when squished, and I found out the hard way that if you try to knock a hornet on the head just hard enough to kill him but leave a good-looking corpse, he might just wake up a few seconds later very, very angry.

So they opted for freezing. They'd take each new catch in a jar or plastic baggie and stick it in the freezer to await the start of school.

This meant, of course, that we always knew when my wife had to get something out of the freezer, because every single time she'd open the door, see the collection of horrible insects and scream.

As we got down to the wire, my daughters started getting more and more nervous. With two days to go, they had only half the bugs they needed. Putting a light outside on the picnic table at night got us part of the way there, and shaking a few bushes did some more.

But with one day to go, time was running out, and one daughter was still one bug short. I was standing outside at the gas grill when a white butterfly came fluttering by. In a panic, I looked for the bug net. I ran after the butterfly, desperately waving the net back and forth, like I was engaged in a sword fight with an invisible opponent.

I also started calling the butterfly names that I can't print in a family newspaper. I chased it down the driveway. Finally, exhausted and angry, I gave up.

That's when I noticed our next-door neighbor, who had been on her way to her car, had stopped for a while to watch. I frowned, threw down the net, and stomped into the house. Unless my daughter came through at the last minute, as God was my witness, she was going to her first day of high school with a stinkbug.

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