The Animal in My House

My Dad and stepmom, PJ, have been here this weekend. More on that later. I had to post this little story, though, because it's really quite humorous.

On Friday, we went out to lunch to a little place on the water. It is one of their favorite restaurants to visit when they come see us. After lunch, Papa and PJ took the girls down to the water's edge to look for shells. Among the average seashells was this beautiful shell that looked to previously be home to a crab. So we took home a few shells, including that one.

When we got home, we put all the shells on the phone stand in the kitchen. We went out (to the Fall Festival at school which is an entirely different post), came home, fixed dinner, and chatted for awhile. At one point, the former-home-to-a-crab shell fell off the phone stand. Since the children had been around it, most of us chalked it up to it being too close to the edge. My comment, however, was that the shell was in the middle of the stand and I believed a creature was still in the shell. So we put it on the kitchen table and watched it for at least an hour. Nothing. Figuring everyone else was right and there was nothing in there, we put the shell back with the others and went to bed.

The next morning, K got up and went to the kitchen to look at her shells. Papa was in there making his coffee (not something that is normally done in this house since neither S nor I like coffee) and K asked, "Where is the crab shell?" Papa looked and, I kid you not, the crab shell was gone.

We looked everywhere for that thing. It wasn't underneath the phone stand or anything else in the kitchen. We got out a flashlight and looked under the stairs, under couches and chairs, everywhere we thought the crab could possibly be. We even slid the china cabinet away from the wall and looked under it. Y'all, the crab was gone. Just plain gone. I figured we would find it when it died and started smelling.

This morning, when K and L got up at 7:00am (no earlier because of our new rules), they both came running into my room and said, "Mommy! We found the crab! We found the crab!" In my sleep-deprived stupor, I told them to bring it to me. I asked them to show me where they found it and it was right by my door. That's a trip through the kitchen and down the hall for this little critter. Yet when we turned the shell over to see if we could see anything other than shell, there was nothing, not even a little foot, to be seen.

We watched the shell all morning and no movement whatsoever. So I took a few pictures of the shell, which is very pretty, and decided to return it to its natural environment. For all you animal lovers out there, have no fear. The crab was returned to his/her previous home safe and sound.