Thursday, July 28, 2011

I Must Ask . . . Do You Have A Pet?

The difference between friends and pets is that friends we allow into our company, pets we allow into our solitude.Robert Brault

Last week's question about height was the most responded to poll so far, with 37 answers. OK, so I voted twice {which was an accident} and one of those 5'4"—5'4⅞" people is me trying to be 10' tall. There was one person who is 4'11⅞" or under and the tallest person to check in is in the 6'2"—6'2⅞" range. Short of that {ha, ha, :lol: I kill myself with the puns} nobody between 5'11" and 6'1⅞" checked in. Fun poll! Thanks for playing along.

Now that I've sized you all up {again with the puns, :rofl: I love it!} let's talk pets today. Do you have pets? We have pets. You'll probably never guess what our pets are, so I'll just tell you. We have fire bellied toads. Yep. Toads.

It happened like this. LadyBug's 1st grade teacher bought toads for her classroom. She decided to take some time off from teaching and go back to school herself, so at the end of the year the toads had to have a new home. LadyBug ended up with one and a boy in the class with the other. The one that came home with LadyBug was named Violet by the class. Well, Violet just had to have a friend, so we went to the Petsmart and bought another toad :crazy:. We decided to call him Henry because two of The Boxcar Children are Henry and Violet.

After we'd had them for about a year-and-a-half, Henry {or maybe it was Violet} went missing. How you can go missing from an aquarium I don't know. But he went missing and Violet {or maybe it was Henry} was left all alone.

By that time, I'd grown quite attached to the little fellows. Cleaning out their smelly aquarium, changing the filter and buying live crickets to feed them kind of endears them to you. Incidentally, I'm the only one who will touch the toads or clean their aquarium. And when the live crickets we have to buy to feed the toads escape from their little case, guess who everyone {including Mr. Bug} calls to come and catch them? Me. But I digress. We were down one toad, so I bought another one when I went to get some more crickets. Henry {or maybe it was Violet} was lonely. I could tell. We decided to call the new toad Pants. And since we weren't 100% sure who the other toad was, we changed that toad's name to Pants as well. Now we have a pair of Pants.

So how about you? I must ask: do you have pets? Tell me about them and I'll post the best story left in the comments about your pet next week.

6 comments:

Shay said...

Do I have pets? This place is a freaking zoo ...so much so apparently that I cant list all my pets in your poll. I spend almost as much on pet food as I do on people food. (I buy 160 pounds of animal food a month )

2 cats, 2 dogs that are approximately the size of horses and a crusty old blue tongue.

Now ...your pets are unusual! Love the name Pants...too funny!

Angie said...

I have 2 Cats (psycho and jazz) and one lizard (spike) add that to the 5 monkeys and we have enough pets! I was actually just working on a post about my cats as a matter of fact. ;)

Amber said...

Someone was just asking me the other day about "violet and steven" the toads that I had in my classroom! I can't believe that Violet (Pants) is still alive. . . . way to be a pet keeper. I am glad that they have brought you joy. Seriously though, feeding them those crickets is kind of gross!

Paulette said...

No pets anymore, but I had dogs as a kid, then parakeets and a rabbit when DD lived at home. I taught my parakeet Penny to wolf whistle and cluck like a chicken, and she also made this other noise I didn't recognize at first, until it occurred to me that it was the sound of my own laughter.

Jill said...

We have two pets. It all started with a red betta fish named Billy. The Student Body President at the local high school thought it would be great to get the boys a fish. But then, Billy died. I think we didn't treat the water with all the right stuff. We had one water additive, but apparently we needed another. So we went to WM and got a pair of goldfish. See, both boys needed to pick one. We named one Alexander (Alex) and the other was Leah (after the signing time kids). But, as gold fish are "disposable" pets, Leah died and now we just have Alex.
Last summer, we decided that we'd like to add another family member. So we started looking online for Beagles who were in need of adoption. We found Lizzie. She'd been at the Humane Society for 3 months, and she was 8 years old. Her time was up. I couldn't leave her there. So we sent an e-mail and asked about her personality. They told us to bring the whole family down, to see how she does with the kids. I could not have picked a milder dog. She is so sweet and old. And we love her. We've had her a year now, and I know it's a year she might not have had if we didn't look for her when we did.
Plus, I know she's the best security system we could ever have. We had a kid come into our house at night (with our permission) who was not a family member. Lizzie went NUTS. She scared that kid so bad, and her barking and growling scared me out of my sleep, too. I can't imagine our house without her.

mills5 said...

We have a fish and 2 chickens. I really like the pets we have right now. They are so easy to take care of, and the chickens give us such yummy eggs everyday. I don't think I could have more than 2 chickens though. It's just fun and a hobby, not a farm. I like your posts :)