I'm Ba-ack!

Wow, I can't believe it's been over three months since my last post! Things got crazy, and I got lazy- hey, that rhymes! A few people have commented to me that they miss my posts on here. It's nice to know that people actually read this thing. And maybe even enjoy it a little.

No one wants a lengthy history of the last few months in the Jackson household. Even if you did, I don't feel like writing one. No one's sick and we haven't moved yet. That's all you get.

But I will share some amusing stories with you.

#1
A month or two ago, Janna came home from school with a surprise for us. It was a plastic baggie with three small snails in it. Oh, goody. She wanted to put them in the tanks with the girls' bettas, and she excitedly told us that "you don't have to feed them because they'll eat the algae and they also help clean the tank." I did some research online before handing down a verdict.

One of the first things I read was a snail owner's description of how their snail grew to the size of an apple and how it stopped eating the algae and they had to start feeding it fresh fruit every day. Not helpful to Janna's cause.

Next I read an account of a person putting two snails in a tank, and how they soon had a multitude of eggs in the tank which quickly turned into a multitude of new snails. Also not helpful to her cause.

However, J. and I are softies and we gave in anyway. We put one snail in each tank, and Janna bought a new little container for the third snail. She also bought some live plants for each tank. Since each snail was alone, I thought everything was fine.

I was wrong.

Last night, Janna announced to us that there was a second snail in her tank.

I went upstairs to check this out, and she was right. I opened the lid to retrieve the snail, and saw something weird floating near the fake plant in the middle of the tank. Then I saw another. And another. I remembered the description I had read online and realized that these were snail eggs. For a moment, I felt like the hero in a horror movie when he goes into the evil alien's lair and discovers that the lumps covering the ground are actually evil alien spawn waiting to hatch and bring destruction upon everything around them.

I checked Heather's fish tank to see if we had the same problem there. I only saw one globule of eggs, which made me happy. But then I saw little brown spots dotting the side of the tank, which did not make me happy. They were baby snails, and there were about two dozen of them. I looked in Janna's tank again and saw five or six baby snails on the side of her tank.

Suddenly this turned into an emergency situation.

We approached it one tank at a time. We moved Janna's fish and adult snail to a holding tank so we could empty out the eggs and babies. But of course, God created animals with self-preservation skills, and snails are no exception. When we dumped the water from the tank, I expected the snails to get washed away with the tide. Once the water was out, the tank looked exactly the same as it did before, except without the water. Wait, that's a lie. I saw some globules of eggs that I had not seen before, so actually it did look a little different now. I tried to scrape the egg globs off with the lid to the holding tank, but all that accomplished was sliding the eggs down into the rocks, where they disappeared from sight. Perfect.

Eventually, after much rinsing, hand-wiping, and shrieking, we removed all the snails and eggs that we could see. Then we did the same thing to Heather's tank. When we were finally done, I could say with a reasonable degree of certainty that we did not get everything.

I was right.

Tonight when I put Heather to bed, I checked the tanks. I removed one baby snail from Janna's tank and two from Heather's. Then I looked again and saw five or six more tiny snails in Janna's tank. And a dozen or so in Heather's.

I couldn't imagine that the snails had been pregnant since we got them, so I checked online to see how long their gestation was. Now, I knew snails are hermaphroditic and can cross-pollinate, so to speak. What I did not know is that a single snail, left to his/her own devices, will perpetuate the species on their own, if you get my drift. In other words, as long as we have one snail we're going to keep having babies.

Either we get rid of the snails or I spend the rest of my life committing snail genocide.


#2
Heather is still trying to decide whether she's going to marry Matthew or Robby. She refers to her future husband as "my honey" and her future kids as "my darlings." Right now, she wants to name her kids Wakko, Dot, and Mary.


#3
Kelly used to covet Heather's little stuffed hippo. To keep the peace, we got her one of her own, and we put an initial on the tag of each animal so everyone would know which hippo belongs to which girl. Kelly knows it's "K for Kelly" and "H for Heather."

Yesterday she was sitting at the table eating her lunch, and a small hippo was hovering over the edge of her plate and staring at her grapes. Heather complained that Kelly was playing with her hippo. So I said to Kelly, "Whose hippo is that? What letter?" Kelly turned the animal over to look at the tag. "H," she said. Then she looked me right in the eye and said, "H for Kelly."

If I didn't know the alphabet, she might've had me.


#4 is due in November.