A Frog For Asher

Asher's favorite birthday present is a bug habitat. It is a plastic environment that you can put bugs and frogs in and keep them there.

One day, when I reached my office, there was a beautiful tree frog on the keypad of the door to my office. This frog was a particularly beautiful shade of green and had long sticky fingers. I thought to myself that I'd take him home for Asher if he was still there at the end of the day. Sure enough, 5 PM rolled around and the frog hadn't moved from the entry keypad. So I scooped him up, put him in the bug habitat that Asher left in the vehicle and brought him home to Asher.

Needless to say, Asher was thrilled. He was over-the-moon in happiness when he saw the tree frog. It is the first pet that was purely for Asher.

And then I learned just how labor intensive it is to keep a tree frog. They need to eat. They eat live crickets. So you have to go to the pet store on a regular basis and buy live crickets. Then you have to keep the crickets alive. And you have to keep habitats clean. That's a lot of work!

Most importantly, the frog I found was a wild one and belonged back where I found it. So, we took the tree frog on vacation to the beach with us and had a blast sucking up bugs with the bug vacuum (remember that thing we bought after Asher's last endoscopy?) and feeding them to the frog and watching him eat. Then, when we got home, I took Asher to the place I found the frog and we released him together.

I've promised Asher that we'd get him a tadpole and watch him grow into a frog. And he can keep that frog for as long as the frog lives. Hopefully we can feed him frog pellets like the grow-a-frog we inherited from Simi's pre-school class, Sofin. Sofin is MUCH easier to maintain.