I'm Lindsay Ferrier, a Nashville writer with a passion for family travel, exploring Tennessee, and raising kids without losing my mind in the process. This is where I share my discoveries, along with occasional deep thoughts, pop culture tangents and a sprinkling of snark. Want to get in touch? Use the CONTACT form at the top of the page.
August 1, 2007
>
I have given up trying to have a normal life, one in which I keep my family on a schedule, say appropriate things at cocktail parties, and maintain a front yard specializing in anything other than weeds.
In fact, at 32 years of age, I’m proud to say I’ve finally accepted the fact that my existence will never be anything other than surreal. How else can you explain the time I wished really, really hard for an iPod and received one in the mail a month later from a PR firm? Or the way a check seems to randomly appear in the mail every time we’re flat broke?
And how else could you explain what happened to me on Monday afternoon?
The day started out ordinarily enough. When I returned from Chicago Sunday night, the house wasn’t the only thing that had gotten filthy in my absence. My 3-year-old daughter hadn’t been properly washed since I had left (“I’m a man,” my husband explained nonchalantly when I questioned him. “I have trouble with those things.”). And so I gathered up the two youngest members of the fam and took them straight upstairs to the tub.
I had just run Punky’s bathwater and was busy undressing her when I felt something cold and wet on my foot. Thinking it was one of her bath toys, I looked down. And. Oh sweet merciful Jeebus, it was…
A FROG! A… A… BIG FROG!
AND THEN IT PEED ON ME!!!!
I did the only thing anyone could do in that situation. I flung it off my foot and commenced to shrieking. I grabbed up Punky standing next to me and hopped up and down on one foot and howled with all my might. Hubs was downstairs and I needed him to come up and save us immediately.
“Hubs!” I screeched. “OH MY GOSH! I… It… How did…!!!!” Try as I might, I couldn’t find the word ‘frog’ in my vocabulary. Post traumatic shock, I suppose. “AIEEEEEEE! Hubs!!!”
In absence of the word ‘frog,’ of course, Hubs knew only that I was upstairs bathing the babies and so assumed the worst. By the time I managed to tell him there was a frog in the bathroom and Oh My Gawd, the baby was still in there in his bouncer with it, SAVE THE BABY!, he was running up the stairs in horror, thinking someone had drowned. Needless to say, he was not amused. He scooped up the frog in a towel, took it outside, and did not speak to me for the next two hours.
Perhaps deservedly, I was in the froghouse.
I was left to return in subdued silence to the bathroom and contemplate one of life’s great mysteries: How the hell did a biggish frog get into our upstairs bathroom? How exactly did that happen? And would it happen again? And was it perhaps a plague sent down to punish me for all the pumping and dumping I did at BlogHer?
“How did that frog get in here?” I asked Punky, who was playing in the tub. “And what if it had babies before it left?”
Punky laughed. “Noooooooo!” she said. “Frogs don’t have babies!”
“You’re right,” I said. “They have eggs, don’t they? Well, what if it had eggs and they hatch and we have tadpoles in our toilet?”
“Mommy, you were scared,” Punky said, “but he not bad. He name’s Jimmy the Frog and he’s a pet.”
And maybe she was right. Jimmy the Frog had featured into all of her bedtime stories lately, joining Princess Punky on the merry-go-round, the swings and the slide before hopping off to a pond somewhere to sleep on his lilypad. Maybe she had wished so hard for Jimmy the Frog to come our house that he had just showed up, unfortunately on my foot. I thought of my iPod. It was toadally plausible.
At any rate, Jimmy the Frog is all she’s been talking about since. “Mommy got a frog on her toes!” she told my friends at playgroup yesterday, “and she go, ‘AAAAAAAHHHH!” That’s my girl.
But let’s look at the bigger picture. Maybe I can make this weirdness work for me. Maybe I could wish for Karl Lagerfeld to proclaim me his muse, or for some old dead guy to randomly leave me his millions in his will, and it. Will. Just. Happen. I mean why stop with frogs and iPods?
Stay tuned.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.