I Love Lizard

This is a green anole

 If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you know, I. Do. NOT. Do. Pets. There are enough mouths to feed with 4 kids and cages rooms to keep clean. I'm not an animal hater. In fact I LOVE dogs...especially Labradors. I just have never thought it would be fair to me an animal with our busy schedules.
After finding two lizards in the boys room that they had captured outside and set free in the house; hubby and I decided it might be time to get them a low maintenance pet.
This is Elizabeth aka Lizzie the Lizard:

We purchased Lizzie for $7.00 at the pet shop. Assuming a lizard would be a cheap low maintenance pet.  If you have ever been in a pet store you know that the employees Love...love....LOVE animals. Almost annoyingly...and I'm pretty sure even more than they like people.

Our first trip to the pet store :

I had all three boys with me and like any kids they were excited to be around all of the animals in the pet store. They were loud-ish and wanted to hold every animal. This clearly annoyed the sales lady right away.  I began asking her about bringing a lizard home as a pet, the care it required, housing, feeding, and jokingly asked "when it dies can we exchange it for a live one?" She said we have a 15 day guarantee to which I asked "how many times in the 15 days can we exchange it for a new one?"  again joking(kind of)....she was not amused at all.  Didn't even crack a smile. She clearly does not have kids!
She handed me some brochures on lizards and told me to go home and read up on them.  She wasn't going to sell me a lizard! I'm pretty sure at that point she wasn't even sure I should have custody of my kids.
I was actually fine with not bringing a lizard home that day, I still wasn't convinced I wanted another mouth to feed pet in the house.

Our second trip to the pet store:

With all three boys in tow again..the little one dressed like batman, we headed to the pet store.  This time we got a sales lady who wanted to get us out of there as soon as possible. She boxed up our lizard: a green Anole, and then took us over to the "lizard habitats".  SERIOUSLY! $70.00 for a lizard cage home and all the fixin's! Heat light, special dirt, thermometer....blah.blah.blah.........I asked her if that was all I would EVER need to buy for this animal other than food and she said yes. Ok.  I handed the lizard(in box) to little batman and we headed to the check out.

I thought the check out girl was going to have a panic attack when she saw little batman holding the lizard. It's not like he was shaking it! She told me it wasn't a good idea to let little children hold the lizard.  This made me laugh out loud. I told her I was pretty sure she didn't want to see what would happen if I took the lizard from batman.....he would have an epic bat-breakdown.

We got home. Set up Elizabeth's home.  Realized that in haste to usher us out of the store the sale's lady neglected to tell us we would need extra accessories for this stupid lizard.  The $70.00 "habitat" did NOT come with "everything" as I was told! At this point, Elizabeth was clearly stressed.  Green Anoles turn brown when they are stressed out.

Third trip to the pet store

At this point, if I was a green anole.....I would be brown. 3 trips to the pet store in one week! I haven't been in a pet shop 3 times in the last 15 years!!!
I went to a different pet store this time. The sales people at this pet store seemed to like people a little more than the last store....though, the sales lady told me everything I learned about lizards at the previous store was wrong and proceeded to show me about a million things I would need to purchase to make Elizabeth happy. I spent $50 on stuff promised to make the lizard happy and went home.
Total overall cost for a "cheap" lizard = $127.00

5 days later this lizard is STILL brown! I have done everything short of laying hands on this thing!  Me and the boys even prayed for it!  I have a strange attachment to this lizard now....actually 127 reason to be attached to it.  Yesterday I found myself sitting next to the cage just watching it and talking to it for like 30 minutes! Really. I told the boys to leave it alone for a few days so maybe it can de-stress and we moved it to the spare bedroom so it's quiet. I am officially a neurotic pet owner...I'll probably start wearing sweatshirts with lizards on them and giving weekly updates about my little "lizard-baby"......if it lives.

 

Tomorrow I will have my race report from the Brook Hill 5k last Saturday and a great giveaway.

Also, I have a HUGE giveaway coming up in the next couple weeks so make sure to check back you won't want to miss it! 

Read my story of hope HERE

Grace and peace,