A Death in the Family

I fully regret to inform you all that Sapo has died. And died he has before I was ever able to introduce him to my blogging friends. He was a good frog. Except for when he would jump away from me when I took him out of his cage. But he was a very good jumper even when he was being naughty. He was only about an inch and a half long and he could jump several feet and super high. I found him on KSL.com for sale for $20. I fell in love with him instantly and had to have him. We drove all the way to South Salt Lake for him. When the girl handed him over he was in this teeny tiny cricket cage thing that was like a little box and it was filled with 2 inches of water with a fake water plant floating in it and Sapo was like 5 inches up the plastic wall away from the water. He's a tree frog! Not a pond frog. He hated that place. Good thing we rescued him. We bought a 10 gallon tank and filled it with bark and a tree and leaves for hiding and a 2-pool rock. He loved his new home. I thought that maybe I was only excited because he was new and that probably over time I'd lose interest in him but this was not the case. I just loved him more and more every day. I fed him live crickets every 3 days by hand cause if I just stuck it in the cage sometimes he wouldn't catch them. I tried to mist him every day and fill his pond with water. Here is the most recent picture of him alive as he's sitting on my thumb. This is when we very first got him 5 or 6 months ago. He was so green! Isn't he so cute!

So I think I killed him. What's weird is for the past 2 or 3 weeks I have had like 4 different dreams that he's died. And I was always super traumatized when I woke up from them cause he would like be bloated, or brown, or shriveled, or his skin would be falling off or something horrid. And it would make me so sad. So I went to work at night, came home in the morning and turned on Sapo's heat lamp and didn't even look in the cage. Then I remembered that it'd been awhile since I filled his pond with water, so I got the water and while I was getting it said to Justin, "Sapo's probably dead! He has no water!", then I walked over with the water and there was Sapo, all shriveled and brown in a stance like he was about to spring forward in a jump! I took one little look and freaked out! I lunged away from his cage and Justin was so surprised and I started sobbing and said, "He really is dead!" then Justin went to inspect and confirm the death. i don't know what was wrong with me, but I sobbed and sobbed. Justin's only seen me cry a few times in the 2 years we've been married, I just don't cry but this made me so sad. I think just because I had had those dreams of him dying and now he looked awful and it just totally shocked me. Plus, I had just worked for like 15 hours straight, all night long and so I'm sure I was a little emotionally unstable. Justin kept saying we could buy another one, but I said I didn't want another one. Then I went to sleep for the day and dreamt that I woke up and found a big gecko dragon thing in Sapo's cage and I was so mad at Justin for buying it and even more made when he said it would only be $200 a month. So he took it out of the cage by it's tail and was showing it to me trying to talk me into keeping it and it growled and bit my neck! Then I woke up.

So we had a funeral for him (right before our softball game hence our lovely outfits) in the backyard of our condo complex. Justin had wrapped him in paper towels and put him in this Lipton Onion Soup box so I didn't have to see him.

I kissed him good-bye and Justin laid him in his grave.

God bless Sapo.