Fred is..........DEAD!

Last weekend started a crazy week of animal encounters for the family. It began innocently enough as a friend of ours is wanting to put her house on the market and wanted a little help outside sprucing things up. Sunday was the only time I had that would work with her schedule and unfortunately didn't work with my wife's as she had a meeting scheduled for most of the afternoon. This presents a couple different scenarios: 1) I take all three boys with me and try to get them to pitch in, or 2) leave them at home by themselves and hope our house is still standing when I get back. I chose option one.

We arrived at our friends and there were some weeds to pull, some sprinkler to fix, but the big ticket item was cutting out some grass to make a new planting bed and mulch it. After nine years of watching my wife prepare to go anywhere with the kids I took the liberty of packing some snacks and bottled water to make sure of their survival, we also threw in the inhaler for good measure. When we arrive I get out a bucket and point out the weeds that are to be pulled showing them how unbelievably easy it is and making it sound like they are saving the planet. They descend on the noxious weeds like a plague. I take this time to go over what the shape of the new bed will be, get out some tools, and start chopping grass. It's at this point that my five year old loses interest in the weed pulling and comes over to 'help' me. I tell him to stand clear and when I say it is safe throw some of the chunks in the wheelbarrow. Worm!!! He spots a nice sized earthworm and decides he will keep him. This is fueled by the fact that his older brother received a leopard gecko for his birthday and this worm is close to being that cool.

He decides to name the worm Fred and to carry him around. I tune out for a little bit trying to get some work done before the other two boys give up on weed pulling. He wanders back in range and I glance up to see he is still carrying Fred but Fred has elongated to about a foot from riding shotgun all over the yard. I tell him to put Fred back in the dirt until we are ready to go, that worms don't like to be carried hoping he will follow instructions and forget about Fred. No chance. They are buddies and will stick together. Fast forward through six bags of snacks and three bottles of water and all in all they have done a pretty good job pulling 50 % of the weeds. I have long since forgotten Fred and get all the tools, kids, and snacks back in the truck to head home.

We pull into the driveway and I open the doors for them to pour out, the two big boys do and that leaves the five year old sitting by himself whimpering. What's up, what's wrong? Did your brothers put gum in your pocket again? He slowly raises his head and whimpers, Fred is.....dead, then starts to wail. I tell him we need to get Fred in the house and some water on him(Fred now looks like a leather shoe string and I know he is DOA) maybe he will be alright. This slight of hand works and gets him back to just whimpering and into the house. He goes straight out to the sand box and puts Fred down. He asks his mother if she thinks Fred is alive, mom tells him she doesn't think so and this sets him to wailing again, Fred is dead!!!!! We explain to him how much worms like dirt and that we surely can find more worms but first we need to create a 'habitat' for them and he brightens a bit. It's great having a teacher for a wife.

With Fred's death behind us, we move on to Tuesday which brings an ornate box turtle into our lives. I happen to be working on a job site south of the South Platte river and one of my co-workers spots the turtle so like an idiot I ask if I can have it to take home to the kids. I call ahead to check with my wife and she sounds excited about it so I think I'm going to be a hero, like an idiot. I drop off the turtle on my way back to the shop and everyone is ecstatic. When I get home that evening the tide has turned. My wife does a little research on the computer and finds out that we are doing irreparable damage to the turtle population because this one is a male and must be released back into the wild. What? The kids are hounding me that it is a living thing and doesn't want to be trapped in a cage, what about the gecko upstairs I'm thinking but have learned to not speak out loud. Fine I will take it back but I won't be going to that job site until Monday, this appears to appease the animal lovers for the time being.

Now it's Saturday and I actually make it to the golf course for the first time this year. When I get home I notice the five year old is in his room and I know something big went down. I say hello to my wife and try to take the temperature of the situation. She seems alright so I venture a little farther by asking what he did to be in his room. She stops typing on the computer and says oh nothing much, he and his friend from across the street let the geckos food go. If you don't know, geckos eat live crickets and we have a cricket cage just for this purpose. He let them all out? Yes there was probably twenty in the cage and he found one. That's pretty creepy. She tells me she sent the neighbor scurrying to find his shoes as she let the thunder go when she found out what happened. Poor kid, he won't be back. I ask my youngest if he tried looking for the crickets to try and repair some of the damage, he tells me I saw one but he hopped back down. Down where I don't know.

So to recap, we buried Fred this week in the sand box, have endangered the ornate box turtle population, have a starving leopard gecko, and there are twenty crickets loose in the house. I'm starting to like cats more and more.