Remember her?

We brought her home, and Aveline quickly set her up in, well, a mansion, basically. That’s the attic of her dollhouse.

We named her Jesco, after the dancing outlaw Jesco White, initially. That’s because we thought she was a boy.

We identified her as a Baja California Tree Frog.

Jonny was super stoked on getting a shot of her mid-air! I’m sorta ripping him off putting his photos on my blog, now that he has one of his own. Surely he’ll tell this story differently than I am.

So tiny and cute =)

I definitely had underestimated how much fun it would be to have a sweetie little froggy hopping around the house! We were all a little worried when we read that frogs should be handled as infrequently as possible. She did start showing signs of red leg : ( But she did recover : ) After the kids stopped playing with her so much : (

We had her for three weeks. In the first week, I got a bunch a frog books from the library. Jonny read one of them to me and from it we learned that typically, you can tell if a frog is a male or a female from the size of the eardrums, which are located just behind the eyes. If they are larger than the eyes, the frog is most likely male, if the eardrums are smaller than the eyes, as in Jesco’s case, the frog is most likely . . . you guessed it.

At that point the kids didn’t feel right calling her Jesco anymore and she became Mary.

Sadly, Mary didn’t thrive under our care. She treated the insects we brought more like intruders than lunch. Her color changed, she stopped hopping around so much. She seemed so depressed that I found myself feeling surprised each morning that she had survived another cold, dark and lonely night.

There was only one thing we could do.

Take her home.

It was surprisingly sweet and emotional, watching her return to her original habitat.

See what I mean?

Sid had been justifying our keeping her captive, by reminding us that she is food for large birds that are so prevalent at Irvine Park. So we were sorta saying blessings to her as she hopped away to this new chapter in her life. Since she looks more like a rock than a frog in this photo : ), we have hope that she’ll have a nice long life.

Obviously, that is where she belongs.

I am the type of person that gives off the scent of fear to animals, they make me nervous and so I make them nervous. Not kidding, farm animals especially, but dogs, cats, rodents, you name it, they act normal with my whole family and then comes the point where I hear, “Mom, don’t you want to pet it?” I do want the experience, so I reluctantly go for it. That’s when the animal starts acting weird and I get schooled on how to properly interact with animals. So, I am especially grateful for this gift that family life has brought me. I never touched Jesco/Mary, but she certainly touched my heart. AAAaaaahhhh! So cheesy, I couldn’t resist!! But seriously, my family is my Rushmore. They offer me so much that I could never, ever dream of doing on my own. Life lived with them is expansive and fulfilling and so much more.

I should also mention that this pet frog business was sort of an attempt to see about unschooling. In that respect, this experience blew doors on traditional homeschooling science. It was so much more than science. The word science sounds cheap in respect to the reach of this experience.