It all started when my two older brothers returned home from helping the neighbor man clean out his storage shed.
Jeffrey plunked a strange contraption on the kitchen bar. “There. That thing was hard to balance while biking. I really need a go-cart!”
“What is it for?” We all clustered around Jeffrey. “What do you do with it?”
“It’s a microscope,” Jeffrey stated matter-of-factly. “Ron was just going to throw it in the dumpster, so he said we may have it.”
He plugged the cord into a receptacle, and a light projected onto a wooden plate. He peered through the eyepieces.
“It’s kinda blurry, but what may I have to put under here?”
Mom helped Jeffrey adjust the knobs for each different item we found, and we all took turns looking at things greatly magnified.
It was amazing! All those miniscule details point to an awesome and mighty Creator. We viewed almost everything that fit under the scope that we could get a focus on—flower petals, hair, slivers of vegetables, butterflies, skin, leaves, and fabric.
Insects were especially intriguing. We learned butterfly wings are covered with many tiny scales and hairs—not the “dust” we had always thought. Stink bugs are ugly to the eye, but under a microscope are ugly indescribable! We also watched an incapacitated wasp open and close his mandibles, and occasionally his proboscis would flick out.
One bug we really wanted to examine was a ladybug. But live ladybugs do not appreciate examinations, and we couldn’t find any dead ones. By the time you were focused, you only caught the tail end of a shiny red shell scurrying off the plate.
Finally Mom found one all wrapped up in a spider’s web. Placing the cocooned ladybug under the microscope, Mom went to work using two pearl head pins to delicately pull the web off the ladybug. Under the microscope, with the web removed, the ladybug’s back looked like a big shiny red blister with black spots.
Flipping the ladybug onto its back, Mom carefully started releasing the legs, and then…the ladybug’s legs started waving in the air! By the time Mom was pulling the last strands of web off of it, the ladybug was walking off the plate!