Last Saturday night we had a gecko get into the house. It kept going under the furniture, but with me moving whatever it went under, Paul was able to catch the gecko pretty quickly and get it out. I remember thinking, “Man, I hope that doesn’t happen again!” Well, Monday night, Abigail hopped into the bathtub (she likes to get in before the water is filled up) and I heard her go, “Augh! A LIZARD!” Sure enough…there was another gecko, this time it was a different, larger one and it was most definitely in the bathtub. Don’t ask me how it got all the way upstairs and into the kids’ bathroom (which is right at the top of the stairs) without any of us noticing, because I have no idea. Paul tried to catch it for a bit, but it somehow disappeared. 😬 A couple hours later, I went to go up the stairs and noticed it on the wall in the stairwell. I grabbed the sock basket (a cloth rope basket that I keep in the stairwell for people to toss socks in if they think they may wear them again the same day) and managed to chase it down the rest of the stairs before trapping it under the basket. Paul took over from there. The poor little gecko did lose its tail (I totally did not realize that if a lizard loses its tail, the tail flops around independently for at least a couple minutes afterwards 😳 but now I do 😂). Paul got the gecko outside (and also tossed the tail outside). Crazy!
One crazy story about one of the morning walks I took with Abigail this week: we encountered what we thought was a dead baby rattlesnake in the middle of a street we were crossing (I drove back to the area where we saw the snake after I dropped Abigail off for school and it was no longer there…so either someone moved it, or it wasn’t actually dead…just too cold to move and it was sunning itself. 😱😬😱) and Abigail got up close and personal with a patch of mud. She was not happy and wasn’t going to walk any further until she was clean (an issue since we weren’t anywhere near home), but luckily she allowed me to use her shirt to clean her up a bit. What an experience!
We’ve also seen an anole lizard hanging out on the back patio. We thought it was a brown anole at first, but then we saw it again and it was green! At first we thought we were looking at two different lizards, but then realized it was the same exact size. So I looked it up and apparently there is a Carolina anole that can change colors between brown and green.
The toads continue to frequent our yard and really like to hang out in the planter on the front porch. I love that they keep the bug population down!
The other bits of nature we’ve been enjoying are pretty flowers, a couple of good, soaking rainstorms and pretty Texas skies. So, just as a warning, there are a ton of sky pictures coming!
