ANYWAY.
There's a pet store next door, so we went in there. If the girls had been with me, I wouldn't have done so. The girls would have fallen in love with every single animal and had to take them home and my failure to do so would have been proof of my lack of basic humanity and absence of any love a parent should feel for their child.
But my son is different. He oohs and ahs over the kittens and puppies, but he doesn't fall apart. So, with a bag of gummy worms and my camera phone, we go into the pet store where I immediately fall apart over this kitten:
This cat was sooooo cute. I bent down to pet him (or her, never found out) and it reached out the bars to play with my fingers. I bent to take his picture, and it grabbed my phone through the bars. That's what it's doing in the first pic, grabbing my phone.
Those of you who know me are probably thinking I brought it home, but I didn't. Murmy could never be anything but the babiest cat in the family, the way my son could never have stood not to be the baby of the family. Still, cute cat.
If the girls had seen this puppy, they would have killed me, hid my body in the shrimp freezer in the back of the store, taken my wallet and brought it home:
That puppy was teething on my finger. Cute. Puppies have very sharp teeth. And it was pulling. My daughter has already named that puppy (c-3po and that's the fourth one she came up with while I typed). She never even saw that dog. Was never in the room with it. Just its puppy picture. We are not bringing it home. Not even when she starts telling me how her head hurts and she's sure that if we bring the puppy home it would cure her.
My son did want to bring this guy home:
You can barely seen it, but it's a chameleon. They do that on purpose, you know. Those tricky chameleons. Who wants a lizard running around that can disappear into the background? I'd either step on it by accident and have to convince the kids I buried it in the yard, when it's really wrapped in a baggie and in the back of the freezer till trash day, or it would hide from me and watch us with its creepy lizard eyes. Yuck.
I kind of dug this frog:
Clinging to the inside of his tank thing, he looks like he's floating. That's why he's cool, but I'm not bringing him home, either. Ditto the snakes, fish and spiders we saw.
No more pets.
Well, sooner or later I'll get my husband to agree to a dog we'll save from the pound, but I'll have to sleep on the balcony and stop eating to make up for the extra costs.
