Welcome to My Zoo

How to care for your new Sea Monkeys: Find a plastic container (I like to use Tupperware), add water and Sea Monkey Water Conditioner. Let rest 24 hours. Open Sea Monkey Eggs package, dump contents into water. Replace lid on plastic container, put in a north-facing window. Now, here's the important part - walk away. Make the welfare of your Sea Monkeys the farthest thought from your mind. Ignore them for a good two weeks. Wait until your Fashion Baby decides she's ready to admit her Sea Monkeys are dead. As you're cleaning your kitchen the next day, take plastic container out of window, remove lid and prepare to dump Sea Monkey carcasses down the sink. Hesitate for a moment when you think you might have just seen the slightest movement in the water. Upon closer inspection, realize the Sea Monkeys are not only alive, but thriving! To no one in particular yell out, "I'll be danged!! The things are alive!!!" Realize you're talking to yourself again, and decide to blawg about it instead.

Welcome to an average day in Fashion Momma's Zoo. In the course of my day, I make sure two cats have food and water and scoop their box. In a show of appreciation for the latter chore, they hop in a nano-second after I'm done, scratch, squat and bury. After all, you can't let a clean litter box go to waste!! When I change the litter, I can feel two pairs of eyes boring into the back of my head, waiting for the moment they can leap into the clean litter. I'm convinced they will hold it, no matter how badly they need to go, if they know there's a chance clean litter is in their future.

I also check on Bob the Frog, who is probably the most low-maintenance pet a person could have. Bob is a man a few words, unless it's 5 a.m. on a Spring morning. When Spring rolls around, Bob starts calling for the female frogs in the neighborhood. Bob fancies himself a ladies' man, and I just don't have the heart to break it to him that he will never see a lady frog again. But other than his early morning ribbits and croaks, we don't hear a peep out of him. Unless he forgets there's a mesh cover over his tank and goes for a flying leap across his 'pond', aka tank. Fashion Baby captured Bob last summer at a local pond, and it's taken him awhile to realize he can no longer go for his personal best in the long jump. When he tries, he hits the mesh cover so hard it makes a fantastic bang, which has caused this Momma to leap out of her skin in the wee hours of the night. And yes, a part of me feels bad about the fact that Bob's habitat is now one-eighth the size it used to be. So please, don't give me grief over Bob. Fashion Baby loves him, and he's well cared for. He's fed live crickets on a regular basis, because Bob refuses to eat his food if it isn't still moving when he swallows it.

At one point in time, we also had an African Tree Frog, Sandy. Fashion Baby determined on her own that Sandy was female, and no amount of questioning would change her mind. The problem with Sandy was she needed more of a rainforest environment, and we don't have many of those in these parts. So, when the temp dropped below 50, Sandy hopped her way to the Great Rainforest in the Sky. We left her in the tank a bit longer than we should have, and then one day, when my baby had a small boy over for a play date, the two of them decided to perform an autopsy on one Sandy the Tree Frog, deceased. They documented their findings, even diagrammed her teeny skeleton, and gave a full report. Cause of death was undetermined, but they were able to rule out foul play. When the small boy's mother found out they'd been handling the carcass, she kinda freaked a tiny bit, something about it being unsanitary...But I made sure they scrubbed all the way up to their elbows when they were done, and then the bones were tossed.

Fashion Baby tends to handle the loss of pets fairly well. Before either of the cats came onto the scene, she was the proud owner of Pebbles the Hamster. While the rodent was rather cute, I loathed the job of cleaning its cage. Loathed it, people! I'd rather scrub toilets with a toothbrush than clean a hamster cage, but I did it. Regularly. Because my baby loved her hamster. But one day, Fate smiled on me, and when I went to feed Pebbles, I discovered she would no longer require food or water. I dreaded telling Fashion Baby, because I knew she would be heartbroken, but when I broke the news, her response was, and I quote, "Ewwwww!! That's gross!!! Will you please throw that away?! Yuck!! Oh, can I have a cat?" Clearly this was a front to hide her pain. I'm sure she was weeping on the inside...

So along came the cats, one at a time, and then Bob, and Sandy, and a dozen fish here and there (all of whom received a proper burial at sea). And most recently? Two dwarf African Water Frogs, each about an inch in size. They came in a cute little acrylic cube, complete with gravel, bamboo and water. All you have to do is feed them twice a week, and add bottled water when the tank gets low. This was the baby's Valentine's Day gift, and I dropped a buck or two on it, I'll admit. Things went swimmingly for a day or two, until I found a floater. I swear people, frogs are not my forte. So the cats and I performed yet another burial at sea. When I texted the news to my friend Tammy, the response was, "Well, that's 34 bucks well spent, eh?" That's what I love about Tammy; she can always find the silver lining...So we're down to one water frog. And then yesterday, we purchased an orange Beta fish, (how cool is that color?!), and put it in a glass vase with orange glass beads and a plant. So far, so good.

So there you have it, my zoo. Final tally: two cats, two frogs, one fish. And Sea Monkeys. For now...