Oc-Toad-ber Frights

From the Desk of Jase:

It's no secret that October is one of my favorite months because I love the Halloween season, even if it's not celebrated here as much as we're used to. When I was visiting Utah for a few days during the corporate convention in September, I noted that many of the semi-vacant strip malls were filled with temporary Halloween Superstores that had sprouted up like mushrooms after a hard rain. I was only able to visit one or two in my brief time, but I was very impressed (and, frankly, envious) that there was so much cool selection compared to the crappy costumes available to kids when I was growing up.

My girls are not at all into scary things, except sometimes light practical jokes involving fake flies in icecubes. But one fun/scary prank we pulled last year was when we found a giant toad under our terrace and decided to have some fun with it. The video was never posted....until now.

The kids got a huge kick out of pranking Tiff, which is why we then decided to get to know the toad a little bit better. You can easily see that the toad is as big as my hands, but he was pretty calm throughout the whole thing. Note how Jocelyn gets it in hand, and then immediately brings it over to Maisy to tease her. This is the reason why we can't keep nice toads around the house.

Here's where we cross over and Maisy has been teased too far in proximity of the giant toad, but we did practice interspecies protection:

And so we have to recover by making the toad seem comical again, and then Maisy is happy again, but still, and very wisely so, toad-wary:

And then we dropped the toad back into the garden where he probably hopped back to his home swamp in Chernobyl. None of the kids had any lasting effects (i.e., nightmares), but they still recall the toad.

So this month I've talked it over with the girls, and we've decided that, to really get into the Halloween season this year, we are going to show you some of the spookier parts of living in France. Like if you get an ice cube in the mail with a fake fly inside it, well, then we had NOTHING to do with it.

Stay tuned...