I got home late last night at almost midnight. Gulley made the late night run to the airport to pick me up because nobody’s cuter than her and she shares my tendency to be a night owl.
When I walked through my front door I could have cried with joy over being home and felt like I barely had the energy to wash the airport off me, but then I climbed into bed and spent the rest of the night tossing and turning and generally not sleeping. I don’t know if it’s just me but I have this thing where I can’t really turn my brain off when I’m exhausted which typically leads to more exhaustion. It always works out so well for me.
And when P woke me up Tuesday morning, I basically managed to get out of bed by promising myself that I’d go right back to sleep as soon as I got Caroline off to school. Alas, that didn’t happen because my mind was still on overdrive with the laundry that needed to be done and the floors that needed to be swept and the mail that needed to be sorted. Even though I’d only been gone for two days it felt much longer and I guess that’s because I traveled last week too and there were just a lot of things that went undone that were driving me crazy.
I spent the day doing laundry and making lists and answering emails and making a monumental trip to the mail store to ship assorted packages. Then I dropped off some boxes at Goodwill, picked up a Route 44 drink from Sonic (water with lime because I’m trying to drink more water and the Sonic ice helps immensely) and then ran by Target because Caroline needs a new swimsuit. All of these errands were super productive with the exception being the swimsuit search because I am apparently Captain Ahab and the swimsuit is Moby Dick in that it’s elusive and mysterious and may be the death of me.
But the biggest news is something that developed while I was away.
I knew P and Caroline had plans to go the ranch on Saturday after I left town, but nothing prepared me for what she told me when I called home to check on them late Saturday night.
Me: “Did you have a great day? How was the ranch?”
Caroline: “Yes! We had a great time! Dad let me bring home 500 tadpoles!”
500 tadpoles is significantly more than the number of tadpoles I am equipped to handle, which is zero.
Because if my understanding of biology and nature is correct, then 500 tadpoles mean our backyard is about to look like ancient day Egypt in the days of Moses and Pharaoh.
Which means I’ll have to move.
But Caroline wanted to show me her new “pets” first thing Tuesday morning and there they were swimming around in what used to be a container I used for food storage but may now cause me to reject all plastic storage apparatuses for all time.
(I put this picture on Instagram earlier and someone commented that they thought it was meat I had marinating for dinner and that’s enough to make me never want to cook again.)
Those are all our new tadpole friends. You will notice that some of them, much like Bruce Jenner, have begun to transition into something else. I may have even seen what I believe to be tiny hops but I can’t talk about that any further or FOR SALE SIGN IN MY FRONT YARD.
In what is either a disgusting or fortuitous turn of events, some of them appear to be cannibalizing their fellow tadpole/frog friends so it seems that our numbers are diminishing. However, let’s not pretend like the answer to how many frogs is too many in your backyard isn’t ONE.
Caroline said she’s trying to sell some of them to her classmates and I can only assume that business proposition is making me extremely popular among my fellow mothers. But she hasn’t had many takers. I think she said about three people are interested. Which leaves us at about 400 tadpoles that are going to need to be relocated to a neighborhood that isn’t my backyard.
So the rest of my week will be spent monitoring the real live biology lab happening on our back porch and convincing her that if you love something, you need to set it free.
And if it doesn’t come back, it wasn’t really yours to begin with.
Or because your mother found a creek located far, far away.
Just a reminder that Amazon finally has Nobody’s Cuter Than You back in stock and you can still get a copy in time for Mother’s Day if you order today. Just click here.