Hermit Crabs

All summer I have been promising David a frog. I wanted to get the "Grow A Frog" kit that one of my childhood friends had. However, all of the Internet reviews said they ended up with a mailbox full of dead tadpoles when you ordered them online. And, in light of our record breaking temperatures, I decided I didn't want to risk it.

So, when Keith saw hermit crabs for sale in a kiosk at the mall, we were sold. After "Meet the Teacher," and on Keith's lunch break, we took the boys to each pick out a strawberry hermit crab and an extra shell. We got home, left them on the bathroom counter, and, when the boys lost interest and asked to play on my IPad, I said, "sure."Unknown to me, this is what happened. David got out Drew's hermit crab, put it on Drew's bed and told him to babysit it. Then, they started playing Angry Birds and when I came in sometime later, they casually informed me that Drew's crab was lost. Furious isn't strong enough for how I felt.

Fine, whatever, how far could it get? I closed the doors, and made them start looking. David kept saying things like, "well, Mom, I know, we can make a new hermit crab out of Legos!" Or Drew would say something equally idiotic like, "Well, I guess we just need to go to the beach and get a new one." AH! One hour, two hours, three hours of looking later and it was still not found. I was so disgusted with them, that I made them eat a snack of bread and water in Drew's room in silence so they could listen for the scuttling of little crabby legs. Did I mention that Drew purposely picked out the "teeniest" crab there was? Oh, and he wanted a natural looking shell, not a brightly painted one, so the shell was the exact same beige as our carpet. I finally let them go play upstairs while I set a trap in Drew's room of tuna fish on tin foil (the Internet has an answer for everything.) Keith came home to a messy house that smelled like tuna because I had gotten nothing accomplished. After dinner, and no luck with the tuna trap, we all went back into Drew's room to search. Tore it apart. Found two things that had been missing for months but no hermit crab. One nugget of info. from google said, "If your hermit crab is lost, just expect to come across it dead one day while cleaning." Nice. So I came to terms with the fact that it had, as David suggested, "vanished." And I worried that David's hermit crab would die of a broken heart.

Around eight o'clock the next morning, I went into Drew's dark room and found the little bugger crawling by the baseboards. Since I refuse to touch the nasty little things, I shrieked for the boys to come collect the prodigal crab.

We have imposed new crab rules since finding "Yoshi" yesterday morning. And we have reserved some books from the library. I think, "How to Care for Your Hermit Crab for Dummies," is appropriate.