All creatures great and small. ( pics added)

We have a pet. Yes, our family, you know, with me in it. I am not an animal lover, I don't understand people who love animals the same as people, more than people even.
I remember a boyfriend once telling me that they had vets bills over a £1.000. I pointed out that he could have bought 2 or 3 pedigree NEW dogs with that. He showed me the error of my ways. I still don't get it though.
So, Seth has been longing for a pet and way back at the beginning of the year we said that maybe, when he was 9, he could have a tortoise ( because I figured even I could cope with exercising a tortoise.) Bless his heart he said " Oh, I will never forget this wonderful day even when I am very old." The back of my brain is tickling, I think that is excitement, is it?" Indeed it was. So, he started to save and he researched everything he could about Tortoises. And he waited.
As his birthday approached he started to waver ( yeay! That was the plan, I was sure he would change his mind in all that time ) however his desire for a pet was every bit as strong, that didn't wane at all.
He decided that he wanted a lizard, or a bearded dragon, or something. He saved an impressive amount of money for a little chap and he also found a vivarium at the car boot sale, a heater / lamp and he was ready. Very ready.
Darn it.
Eventually, because he is my son, he decided that he would buy a Green Anole, for £9.99, a practise lizard because £60 for a breaded dragon is a steep price when you are nine and he wasn't sure he would be able to keep it alive.
Greeny came home on monday evening. Oh we have been so excited about him, he has a reptile ladder and he has plants and rocks, flat rocks, bark, water mister thingamajiggers. It is the grandest £9.99 lizard you ever did see.
I think these boys are going to love it to death.
They poke it and stroke it and pick it up and look at it, they watch it and stare at it and the light goes on and off and on and off and I am NEARLY~ DEMENTED.
I don't like animals but I truly hate poor treatment of animals. If you have a pet, you look after it.
I have lost count of the times I have said, since 5pm on monday, " Wash your hands, with HOT soapy water" and " Leave that lizard alone, it does not like being picked up" also " PUT IT BACK" ( that to Sophie at 3am when she was quite drunk and very loud and I saw she had it in her hand, in her room)
This evening, I went to get the bath ready for the boys and good heavens, as I opened the bathroom door, there they were, all 3 of them in the bath already and there, sitting on the side of the bath, in a takeaway sort of tupperware box, was the lizard, looking very sorry for itself.
"He LOVES swimming" Said Seth.
"No, he doesn't" said I.
"But he was doing it! I held his head above the water so he wouldn't drown and he was SWIMMING!"
"This lizard is going back into his vivarium, under the warm light, you are not to open his door at all tonight. AT ALL, even ONCE. You will kill this little creature and if you do I will be furious. If you do not listen to me and you touch this lizard, if you do not hear me when I say that it does NOT like being handled, it does NOT like swimming, it likes warmth and to be left alone, if you don't understand that then you are clearly not old enough to have a pet and I will take him back to the shop and explain that you are cruel and will not be keeping it. Do you hear me? All of you? "
"yes"
"do you understand me?"
"yes"
"all of you?"
"yes"
"then you are not deaf and you are not stupid so if you touch it again this evening you are just being disobedient and you will be very sorry."
Isaac and Elijah lasted 30 minutes and they went to bed without a story at 7pm.
Seth ( as far as I know,) resisted the temptation to teach Greeny to , oh who knows? Sky dive with the mini parachute out of the bedroom window perhaps.





I found Elijah on the shed roof again today, he said he was searching for flat rocks, and he had found some too, I am sure the rocks weren't on the roof, I am loathe to investigate too deeply for fear of discovering he had shimmied up the side of someone's house and pilfered the lead off their roof. Little bugger.
( am kidding, no-one uses lead for roofing anymore, cheap that's what we are these days)
You know, I am sure my other boys didn't do this stuff, they were nice children and helpful, well behaved and thoughtful, asleep by 6pm every night and never ever got dirty. Perhaps my memory is poor, whatever, they get it from H.
I am neurotic about this tiny creature who is one of God's creatures after all.
I check it often and I mist his vivarium. I want him to be warm and comfy, fed and happy and I am pretty sure that we will never be a family of many pets. My heart can't stand it.
I'm too tired to write much more this evening, sad I know, I am always so riveting to read.
Tomorrow, maybe I will tell you about the nightmare quantity of flies in the laundry room, as long as I can write about it in the past tense, right now they seem to be sunbathing on and around the blue fly killing lamp I put in there to KILL them.
WTH is going on in this house, mice and smells and flies and ...do green anoles eat flies? That'd be so handy wouldn't it?