tap tap tap

A few years ago I had the brilliant idea to order a tadpole so that my friends with emotional disabilities could work on taking care of something that would not be as scary like caring for a real person. For a brief while we ended up with two tadpoles, until one ate the other in a devastating experience (I mean, these were for my kids with emotional disabilities and then one just goes and eats the other? How was I suppose to explain that? Turns out the kids just didn't care, although they never did learn the actual cause of death).

So, a few years later what was a cute tadpole has turned into a rather large aquatic frog that can never be released into the wild because it would alter the eco-system here. It's a fairly large, disgusting looking frog. The company claims their frogs are see-through so you can use them in biology classes to see the inner-workings of the frog, but in reality it is just a large, grey blob.

The large size of the frog may stem from the fact that I used feeding him as a reward with some of my kindergarten friends with special needs. They loved this, it got them to sit quietly, and so the frog may have been fed WAY more than was healthy. Sometimes you do whatever you can do to have children sit quietly. I am not ashamed.

A month or so ago I realized that having the frog in its original small half-gallon tank was cruel and unusual animal treatment so I decided to upgrade. Of course, it also seemed ridiculous to put him in the ten gallon tank I owned and I didn't actually want to go buy a new tank for the thing, so, with the help of my Friday morning reading club we transferred him into one of my plastic file crates. The files have still not found a home, but the frog can now actually swim instead of just floating in a container his actual size.

Although most of the kids love the frog I have a love/hate relationship with him.

Or excuse me, her. I learned it is actually a girl. But how can anything that ugly be a girl?

Part of my love/hate relationship is the fact that I cannot seem to let her die. No matter how many of my coworkers (and Jenny's husband) are convinced that we could all die in a nuclear attack but my frog would outlive the cockroaches, I am not convinced. So, when I could have stayed at home in my pjs when school was cancelled during the blizzard, I braved the snow to go rescue the dumb frog for the holidays.

Which means the frog is now sitting in my dining room, swimming around in her plastic filing crate, with cook books stacked on top to prevent my cat from knocking the top off and eating her.

My cat is obsessed with the frog.

Determined to get her out and play with her.

Our holidays have been filled with a constant 'tap, tap, tap' as my cat sits on top of the file box, hoping that at any moment the tank will dissolve and my frog will have free reign to play with the frog.

It is driving us crazy.

As I quietly sipped my coffee this morning and caught up on my google reader the cat ignored me completely and went on 'tap, tap, taping' after the frog.

Last night after Mr. Lipstick and I came in from a holiday party the cat looked up to greet us and then resumed her place around the tank, so that as we unwound from the day all we heard was 'tap, tap, tap'.

I believe that everyone in our family, the cat excluded, will be relieved when the frog makes the trek back to kindergarten. The poor frog seems so much happier around kindergartners with special needs than he does in my house.