When Pet Frog Arrives, It’s Wise to Check Up on Phase 2
Our frog died recently. Croaked, I guess you could say.
Naturally, we are very upset. For one thing, we will no longer be able to gross out dinner guests by saying, “Before you eat, would you like to see our frog?”
For another, the little guy was kind of neat: completely aquatic, eerily transparent (more on this later) and easy to take care of. So easy, in fact, that for quite a while--a month, perhaps--we didn’t have to feed him.
Which is probably why he died.
As the more astute among you already may have surmised, this was no ordinary frog. Rather, it was something called a Grow-a-Frog, which, for those who are not yet aware that mad scientists have finally found gainful employment, was raised by “frog experts” at the Three Rivers Amphibian Frog Farm in Florida.
I know this because it says so on page 12 of “Frog Fun and Facts,” a tiny booklet that was sent to our home, along with an even tinier tadpole, by Three Rivers Amphibian Inc. of Massapequa, N.Y., makers of the amazing Grow-a-Frog.
The test-tube tadpole was a birthday present to my daughter, Katie, from one of her friends. To shield his identity lest he be swamped with requests for these bizarre beasties, I shall refer to him only as Eric.
It was at Katie’s 9th birthday party this summer that Eric, who apparently knows more than I ever did about impressing girls, made the big presentation.
“Wow!” Katie exclaimed. “Look what Eric gave me!”
“What, sweetheart?” I said gently. “A Barbie doll? A Debbie Gibson tape?”
Katie: “A frog!”
Me: THUD.
It wasn’t a frog per se, but a certificate promising the delivery, in about two weeks, of the world’s only laboratory-tested, fully guaranteed, see-through creature.
Sure enough, two weeks and one day later, the doorbell rang. It was a friendly parcel person with a package containing one live Grow-a-Frog tadpole, one Stage One Plex-Aquarium, one packet of Nutri-Rocks, one Deco-Plant, one container of Stage One Food and one edition of “Frog Fun and Facts,” soon to be a minor motion picture.
The first thing we noticed, aside from the perplexed look on the face of the friendly parcel person, was that the tadpole was transparent. As he swam around in his little bag, we could actually see his tiny heart pulsating.
After fainting temporarily, I consulted “Frog Fun and Facts” for information on how to care for the little monster, which we named not Frogenstein but “Gilly.” I read the introduction (“Hoppy days are here again! I’m Grow-a-Frog, your new pet friend!”) and two pages with the headings “I’m a Beautiful Baby” and “Turning Into a Prince” before coming to the important stuff.
It seems, for instance, that Grow-a-Frogs, which are “hand-picked, carefully packed and sent fresh from the farm to you,” are pretty particular about the water they live in. As it warns on page 16: “Please use only bottled SPRING or PURIFIED WATER for your tadpole.”
Reasoning that it was a small price to pay for the welfare of a mutant amphibian, we bought a gallon of spring water and poured some of it, along with the Nutri-Rocks and the Deco-Plant, into the Stage One Plex-Aquarium, which was nothing more than a small plastic box with a hole in the top.
We faithfully fed Gilly one level spoon of Stage One Food every day, as instructed, and changed his water once a week. Before long he had sprouted four tiny legs, at which point we were supposed to stop feeding him. That’s because he would get all the nourishment he needed from his tail.
Here is where the confusion began. Although the frog’s tail eventually disappeared, the instruction booklet said he would still get nourishment from the Nutri-Rocks, a bunch of weird blue pebbles that provided additional food.
So we left the little guy alone. Unfortunately, we weren’t too clear on when we should resume feeding him. “Frog Fun and Facts” said only that, during Stage Two of his development (whenever that was supposed to be), he could subsist on “small pieces of earthworm or beef heart.” Yum.
Needless to say, the frog went belly up one day. After a brief mourning period, we had a private toilet-side service.
I suppose we could fill out the replacement guarantee and wait for a friendly parcel person to deliver another Grow-a-Frog. From now on, though, I think we’ll stick to goldfish.
