Catching Frogs

The kitchen sink is full.  The livingroom  carpet is covered with winter coats and boots.  There are a few Cheerios under the table that the dog has not yet found from breakfast. A load of laundry waiting by the laundry room door. A sewing machine, a suitcase full of corks, and a bulletin board sit at the top of the stairs.

Standing in front of me is my youngest daughter. She has on her rubber boots. She is ready to go to the pond at the top of our street to look for tadpoles.

We packed a picnic lunch in a wooden Longaberger hamper. Something I use to  have neatly displayed beside by living room sofa. Now it is used and not on display.   Our lunch was left over chinese food  heated  in the microwave. She had white rice, and I had chicken with snow peas.  60 seconds on high, and it was still warm by the time we pulled the red wagon around the block and up the hill to our spot beside the pond. In the hamper was the book, Annison’s Risk by Paul McCusker, strawberries, celery, cloth napkins, forks, water, paper cups, and our microwaved lunch.

Today we found  frogs.  We counted ten.  We heard them before we saw them.  They stopped when we walked over, it must have been intermission.

She caught a frog between two paper cups.  She only kept it in the cup for a few minutes, then decided to let the frog go. “Good bye Tod. No, good-bye Toddette. Go and lay some more eggs.”

 

 

We came home and made a tent in the basement. She brought in about eight large stones and formed them into a circle. She placed sticks in the center and asked if it was okay to have a fire downstairs.  Our food in the backyard is tied up under the deck so the bears can’t get to it.   She found some stones in the backyard and tried to make them into arrowheads on the cement floor in the basement. The stones were too fragile, they kept breaking. We came upstairs and did research on the computer to find out the best kind of stone to use to make arrowheads, and watched a video on how to make them.

We watched the 1964 television show “The Munsters” on Netflix on our TV in the basement, as we pretended to be pioneers camping outside.  My husband is reading Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder to her. Pa always has his gun with him. She went and got her pine revolutionary gun she bought at Valley Forge last year. If you pull the trigger it goes “click”.  She placed the gun beside our tent in case any bear came when we were sleeping.

This week we will go to the Rock Shop in Boyertown, Pennsylvania to buy Obsidian or Flint to make arrowheads, and we will make another trip to the pond to see if any frog eggs have hatched.  Maybe we will name the babies Timmy and Tammy, after the first initial of their mother.