There was a show on television when I was a kid, though I don’t recall the name, but I recall the premise. A kid would have a secret/weird talent or collection or hobby that a panel of celebrities would have to guess. It was on Nickelodeon so the once infamous “green slime” was involved if the celebrities guessed wrong and I’m sure some kind of prizes were involved. And, like most game shows, I wanted to be on it.
One evening, my sister and I were playing in our yard. We noticed one tiny baby frog hop out of the grass and then another and another and soon what seemed like a whole school of tadpoles must have recently acquired legs because there were so many squirming through the grass. I looked to DeAnna and shouted: “Get a box! Let’s catch them.”
My thought was that maybe if we caught enough of them we could be on the show as expert frog catchers or maybe even breaking some kind of record for number of frogs caught in one go. Obviously, I didn’t understand how Guinness Records worked, but that’s what happens when you are an excited child just wanting to do something big.
We scrambled around the yard, scooping up frogs and plopping them into the box. Of course, most ended up hopping right back out. We hadn’t really thought ahead to their capacity to jump. We were focused too much on the catching and not the keeping.
While we never made it to the show, we did end up with several baby frogs in a box that day. I doubt it was record breaking, but it was certainly more frogs than I’ve ever seen in one place.
