Meeting Frog & Toad and Other Creepy Crawlers

Before I left the states I was known by friends and family as the “Ant Warrior”. I battled ants in my house daily! I couldn’t stand them in my kitchen. It irked me to no end. I even used that horrible pesticide a time or two. Now, I don’t know what I was expecting moving to the Amazon. Maybe, I thought houses would have screens on their windows so that creepy crawly and flying bugs wouldn’t come in…wrong! There are no screens in this country! And in many cases there are no windows either. Like our new house, for instance. There are elaborate bars on the window frames, but no windows. The only explanation I can come up with is that bugs are just a way of life here. Last night, I went from my room to the kitchen around 6pm, after dark, and there was a labyrinth of bugs on the walls and floors of the hallway and kitchen. I felt like I was in some scene from Indiana Jones… I gathered up my skirt and ran through to the kitchen, I only got a few flying ants in my hair!!! Tonight we took some stuff over to the new house and when we entered the kitchen we were met by a little green frog. She was cute. I’m assuming it’s a she because it was in the kitchen!! How chauvinist of me! Anyhow, Gracie was all excited since we just read the “Adventures of Frog and Toad” for naptime. A little bit later we went to use the bathroom and opened the door on Toad! A large frog sitting very still on the sink, looking stoic. He was the size of a hardball. Now, I’m assuming it was a he since it was in the bathroom, and we all know its hard to get a man out of the bathroom, especially if he’s got something good to read. Unbeknownst to me, Cosmo had written a to-do list of rules for husbands, and number three on the list was to take frogs out of the bathrooms. Thank God, because I wasn’t quite up to the task. Since I’ve got eleven more months in the jungle, I’ve acquired a Zen-type feeling toward those tiny adorable creatures. They are good for the ecosystem, they are not here to terrorize me specifically, they are not going to crawl up my nose while I sleep AND, they are not going to crawl in my mouth and poop on my tongue. Gross!