The black speckled bright pink frog

The week before Christmas my daughter's teacher did a "Christmas Around the World" theme all week. Each day they learned about another country and how they celebrate Christmas and their traditions. One of the days they made English Christmas Crackers like this one:

According to Wikipedia a Christmas Cracker "consists of a cardboard tube wrapped in a brightly decorated twist of paper, making it resemble an oversized sweet-wrapper. The cracker is pulled by two people, and, much in the manner of a wishbone, the cracker splits unevenly." There is usually a little gift in the cracker. Again, according to Wikipedia, "Typically these contents are a coloured paper hat or crown; a small toy, small plastic model or other trinket and a motto, a joke, a riddle or piece of trivia on a small strip of paper."




The Christmas Crackers my daughter's class made were made of toilet paper rolls and tissue paper. Inside her Cracker was a black speckled bright pink frog exactly. like. this:

It's one of those sticky rubbery quarter size toys that if you throw it against a wall it will stick and kind of walk down by flipping up and over itself. She was excited about it. She played with it for the week leading up to Christmas and it made it's way into our bathtub at some point and then it was in a bedroom on the floor, on the dining room table and on the counter in the kitchen. This frog had quite the adventure.

On Christmas Day we did presents at our house just the four of us and then we got ready to go to my mom's. My husband was busy with one thing or another and the baby wanted no part of being put in his crib while I showered so I just took him in the shower with me while my daughter watched tv. He and I got showered up and to finish I put him down in the basin of the tub with some bath toys so I could wash my hair. We got out, my husband showered, we all got ready and we left for grandma's.

Christmas night my when we got home my daughter asked if she and her brother could take a bath. I agreed so upstairs we went. As I was getting the baby undressed, my daughter asked where her frog had gotten to. I hadn't seen it but her dad was the last to shower that morning so maybe when he took the toys out that her brother had been playing with, perhaps he saw it. When we asked my husband he just said that whatever was in the tub he moved into the toy bin. When we looked in the toy bin the frog was nowhere to be found. I brushed it off and told my daughter it wasn't a big deal, play with something else and she did. No big whoop.

The next morning we all got up and went downstairs still in our jammies. About mid morning the baby did that thing where he grunts and gets all red in the face and then my husband and I draw straws to see who gets to where the biohazard suit and change the baby. This time I drew the short straw. I grabbed the baby before he could squeeze the poop up the back of his diaper and cause a blowout, grabbed a diaper and wipes and laid him in the middle of the living room floor.

Something you should know about my son is he LOVES to eat paper. He is a human paper shredder. You leave the smallest piece of paper around, he'll find it and devour it. Well, when I opened his diaper, I noticed a little bit of a paw type pattern of black dots and wondered what direction booklet from Christmas morning he could have possibly gnawed on that he'd have a paw print in his diaper? No time to investigate at that moment with the wiggly baby who can't sit still for a 5 second diaper change, so I put my investigation on the back burner until his diaper was changed and he was redressed.

Once he was on his way I opened the diaper back up to perform a more thorough investigation with a wipe firmly placed as a barrier over my finger tip. I poke at the paw print. It bounced back at me. "Huh"...I thought, "that's weird! Why would a piece of paper bounce back when I poke it?" So I poked it again, and again it bounced back. I realized this was not going to be an easy investigation. At this point I started digging a bit more at the poop surrounding the paw print. A few more pokes and a little prying and "BOING!" all of a sudden this little frog leg sprung out at me from one side. I went ghostly pale, sat bolt straight up right there on the floor and mouthed the words "OH. MY. GOD." My husband was sitting on the couch right in front of me while my daughter sat on the chair right next to me and the baby happily crawled away. My husband looked at me and said "What?" I couldn't say it out loud so I mouthed "It's. The. FROG!" He shook his head and exclaimed "No way!" and I insisted it was. It was no longer bright pink as I think being put through the gastric juice wringer had stripped all color away. What I thought I had identified as a paw print was actually the black speckles which I guess endured the gastric juices.

Go ahead...

I'll let you finish laughing your fool head off and finish my story.

Needless to say we were stunned. This kid is a hoover! He eats anything and everything he can shove in his pie hole, edible or not. It's both funny and scary this happened. Funny for obvious reasons, mainly how often can you say you found a black speckled bright pink frog in your baby's poo? Scary because HOLY CRAP, he ate that thing WHOLE (again, about the size of a quarter) and we had NO IDEA! Had he choked it would've been one thing, but it went down easy, what if it had gotten lodged in his body somewhere? We would've had no clue anything was wrong and never would've known to look inside for something specific like a black speckled bright pink frog. I had no idea that it was in the bathtub the morning before when he and I showered. I didn't see him put it in his mouth. He never so much as coughed trying to get it down.

After the whole ordeal was over I couldn't help but think back to Christmas day. I recalled thinking about mid-day that he hadn't pooped and he was usually like clockwork. He poops at almost the same time every day just like his daddy. I knew it was odd but who knows, all the excitement of the day maybe he was holding out. I didn't really give it too much thought but the thought that it was strange he hadn't pooped was there for sure. Also? THANK GOD it came out on it's own! THANK GOD it wasn't a bigger frog! Amazing. I am simply amazed by the whole event. We'll be watching him like a hawk. He'll be the kid who eats pennies and sticks green peas up his nose, I just know it. Lord help us.