Changes . . . Big

Maj’s smaller frog Big died.  I knew it was coming, and I kept checking on him in hopes that I would be the one to find him.  I had some idea of trying to make him look as though he had died in his sleep.  Curling his little frog legs back under his body and shutting his one good eye so that he looked  . . . . well . . . dead, but peaceful.

But Maj found him when she came home from school yesterday.  Curled up peacefully next to the water pond (it was as though he knew my plan).  Except Maj wasn’t sure that this peaceful state was death (Big was a sluggish creature in the best of times), so she picked him up and placed him on his favorite branch.  At which point he rolled off (because he was dead) and fell to the moss below.  And as he fell out of the branch, his legs extended and he flipped over and landed on his back.  So when I came rushing in to see what all of the screaming was about, the frog looked for all the world like a little teeny dead person, his pale bloated belly and extended limbs a pale pink color.

It was a very sad day for Maj.  She was inconsolable for about an hour, and then busied herself with arranging a final resting place for her pet.  She arranged some moss and misted some water into a Tupperware container, and Big the frog, thus ensconced, is currently resting on the top shelf of our closet.  Much to Mark’s chagrin.

Not sure what Big’s next stop will be (the closet is only temporary, I promise).  But as Maj pointed out when she checked on his deadness a little while ago, “He doesn’t really look like much now that all the Big-ness has been sucked out of him.”  We talked about what a good pet owner she had been, and I apologized again for the fact that the trip to Oregon had been too much for our little handicapped and paranoid frog.  We both stared sadly at the one frog left alive, and he stared back at us with unblinking eyes.

A lot of Mom guilt here, as I am the one who researched and arranged the frogs’ transport up here.  Sigh.

In other news, Mark and Maj made fudge!  Sadly, they both thought they were above the need for a candy thermometer or figuring out what “hard-ball stage” was.  So what they actually ended up making was fudge syrup.  The girls are eating it right now, and I hear Mark marveling about how the pan refills itself as they scoop from it!  It’s a never-ending supply of liquid fudge!

He’s a good Daddy.

A Daddy who isn’t responsible for the death of a single pet.

Sigh.

Rest in peace, Big