MARK MY WORD: FROM WOOLLY WORMS TO KIDS, THEY BREAK THE MOLD

From purple pizza to purple worms, the culinary delights served up by our daughters never ceases to amaze us.

Becca and Bailey are forever setting up shop in our living room, dining room, computer room and just about everything else in our house.

Some day, they'll make great entrepreneurs. They always want to sell you something, and they never take no for an answer.

Their countless todays are filled with opportunities to play store. Of course, they quibble over the play money from time to time. Both girls want the bucks.

The other night, they cooked up a storm with Play-Doh, that messy clay-like stuff that can be sliced, diced and rolled into everything from pizza to pancakes.

Bailey fixed me up a batch of turquoise cereal flakes while Becca gave me a few scoops of white "ice cream."

Of course, none of it was free. I had to fork over all the play money to get my meal. That's the entrepreneurial spirit. It's enough to make any chamber of commerce proud.

It wasn't long before I grabbed a container of Play-Doh and set about creating a cracked egg or two. Then, I moved on to making a purple snowman, complete with gigantic purple eyes.

Not to be outdone, Becca quickly made her own snowman. There were plenty of purple worms as well.

But these aren't the only worms getting the attention lately.

The old, reliable woolly worm takes center stage every fall, running circles about the nation's two-legged weather forecasters. OK, so the woolly worm doesn't have a college degree or color radar. What the woolly warm does have is a track record that would make even the most veteran weatherman envious.

Woolly worm fans insist the fuzzy caterpillar is more than 70 percent accurate in predicting if winter will be on the mild side or if it will more closely resemble the Ice Age.

The lighter the brown bands on the woolly worm, the milder the winter, so the theory goes.

Four of the caterpillars, sporting mostly brown bands, were found lounging recently in a farm field near Oak Ridge. Clearly, they think it will be a mild winter or they would have packed it up and headed to Florida.

A few weeks ago at Bailey's day-care center, I saw a woolly worm whose bands were very light brown in color. Naturally, I was thrilled. It means I won't have to wrap Bailey up like an Eskimo this winter. As for Becca, coats are optional.

Two-year-old Bailey doesn't mind wearing a coat, but our 6-year-old tends to have a leave-it attitude about winter coats.

The official woolly worm prediction will soon be announced from Banner Elk, N.C., where as many as 15,000 of the worms' biggest supporters gather each year for the annual Woolly Worm Festival.

The fuzzy weather forecaster is chosen on the basis of a race. The caterpillar that finishes first in the race along a piece of string is the one that gets to predict our nation's winter.

For woolly worms, the festival is the Super Bowl and World Series all rolled into one. If you're a woolly worm, it doesn't get any better than this.

As for Becca and Bailey, they're too busy to notice the woolly worms.

A friend of Becca's stopped by to play Saturday. It didn't take long before both girls were hard at work in the Play-Doh workshop. It's tough to resist a chance to create something, even a purple, non-forecasting worm.

Molding this stuff is a heck of a lot easier than molding children. Like other children, Becca and Bailey don't fit a mold, they break it.

You can put that clay stuff back in the container, but you can't do the same thing with your children.

Still, that's fine with us. That clay stuff can get brittle if left out. Children and woolly worms are made of stronger stuff.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.