The Randomness of My House

So Jason is a funny guy (I think I start off all my posts about him by saying this). His head is filled with completely random and usually un-useful bits of knowledge and his creativity and curiosity often drive me crazy. Sometimes it's great, like when preparing for a 4 year-old's pirate themed party. He loves to go all out. But other times, like when we were at a toy story 3 years ago and he found these little guys, it's not so great.

Since Spencer was only 18 months old, I convinced him not to send in our certificate right away. About a year ago, while cleaning our room, he ran across the fabulous little box, dug out the certificate, and him and Spencer made a trip to the Post Office to order our 'pet'. We shortly recieved a kit looking like this in the mail.

Unfortunately, that wasn't good enough for "Bill Nye, the Science Guy". He convinced me somehow to upgrade to this.

Which of course also included a new 'tadpole'. We had to keep them seperated however because the bigger, more matured frog was trying to eat the newest addition to our family. So the cool tube feature wasn't even usuable and I hated the whole contrapition. There was no good spot for it anywhere in the house. I eventually moved it to the middle shelf of a small bookcase until the fateful day that Sophie grabbed the whole thing and pulled it down. Luckily only frog water was spilled and no actual frog bodies. By this time they had grown to be about the same size and so we were able to move them into a new container. Unfortunately, it was one of my favorite clear cookie jars, and again unfortunately, it began it's residence on a corner shelf in my kitchen. We decided after a few weeks to 'loan' the frogs to my cousin Kimmie since the novelty of them had long since worn off for me, and was finally starting to wear off on Jason. We thought the move to Kim's would be okay with Spencer until it was 'Pet Week' at pre-school and he realized that not only were these his only pets, but they were lame. No dogs or cats around here. Just underwater frogs. Needless to say, they stayed and whatta ya know, a fish joined them. Seperate containers but now hanging out right next to each other. After all, lame pets are better than no pet at all to a four year old. Our frogs look something like this (sorry for the quality, I had to use an internet found pic since the water in our container is so dirty right now, this sentence is completely being aimed at Jason, but I know it won't do any good).

When we left for our vacation a few weeks ago, we kinda forget to ask anyone to tend to our 'pets'. Thanks goodness for Kim, the animal lover, who so kindly came over on her own and fed our frogs. When we got home, Jason remembered the poor little guys and fed them again. A few days later, I came out of the shower to find everyone looking around the house for an apparent lost object. Jason looked up and quite seriously and completely casually says, "Do you know what happened to Spencer's frog?" Uh, excuse me? I of course then realize everyone is looking around the house for a missing, underwater only, frog. Which in my mind translates to a missing, underwater only, DEAD frog. After searching everywhere and discussing the logistics of such a disappearance, we came up with nothing. No tracks, no evidence, no body. We're still not sure if one of them could have really jumped out, or if one of our frogs suddenly turned cannibalistic. For a few days I was super paranoid about any area that smelled a little funny or anytime a dark, stiff and dead looking object was found. Like one of these little scuba diver guys that Sophie so nicely scattered all over the house the same afternoon the frog went MIA.

It's unreal how 'dead frog like' these guys look when sticking halfway out from under a closet door, or the couch, or in the bottom of a toy basket...
And we still don't know where our frog is.