I’m not sure where they came from… but they came. Last year I didn’t notice a single frog but this August the kids mentioned that they had seen a few frogs in the window wells. Cool, I thought, but didn’t give it much attention. Then one morning they showed me through the basement windows that we had frogs bouncing up and down in the window wells. More than a few. Yikes. I sent Ryan down there on a rescue mission – I did NOT want dead frogs to clean up. He found 19!
Megan and Luke were a little unsure of touching our new friends. Emily and Matt, on the other hand, had no hesitation and picked them up three at a time.
I thought 19 frogs was a lot. It wasn’t. The next day the kids collected 89. After I showed Luke some pictures of 8 year old Ryan collecting frogs in our first Washington home, Luke decided he wanted to be a frog holding boy too. After that he didn’t have a problem picking them up at all.
Boy, were these happy times around the Johnson house. Every morning for two weeks the kids dutifully scrambled down all six window wells to collect frogs and add them to the growing collection. Then the Egbert kids started collecting them from under their trampoline and the Hale kids brought their collection over and they dumped them into a huge plastic bin which they kept right outside the Egbert’s garage. It was pretty disgusting – but the neighborhood band of frog collectors thought it was awesome. They numbered close to 200 at any given time – with a couple of salamanders as well. The kids named a lot of them… Bull (the biggest – all the way at the top), Jumpy, Hoppy, Bouncy, Chubby, Teeny, Weenie, Eenie, Meenie, Minie, Moe…
Several times ‘the moms’ ( in opposition of this whole operation), made ‘the collectors’ let the frogs go – but I assume they just hopped back and needed to be ‘rescued’ again. Fun times.
Then we met King…. sitting outside on our front lawn one night. He was massive and the kids were pretty excited about his size. Matt, remembering one of Ryan’s ‘frog on the head’ pictures decided that was a good idea and everyone followed suite – except Megan (who still needed gloves to hold frogs most of the time) braved up for a bare handed photo with King but no head photo. That would be crazy. I can still hear all the squeals when King launched out of everyone’s hands. I may have squealed a little too.
