Of iguanas and lizards

Last night when Mr. SAHM got home, he asked our son what he'd shared at school. (Having read my first post and knowing the story.) He was a little concerned that the teacher may think he needed anger management help from the "punching holes in the wall" story she'd heard. Keeping in mind that this was now evening, and preschool sharing happened in the morning, it is not surprising that a 4-year old had no recollection of any such stories being told by him. He did however say what the "Letter of the day" was. And I quote: "L. L says ulll..ullll..ulll.....iguana..." That's supposed to be "lizard" for anyone familiar with this phonics program. They learn a new letter, its sound, and a corresponding animal that starts with the letter and sound. Our son saw an iguana and appropriately called it such. I don't actually know if it was an iguana or other type of lizard. Evidently he apparently is not yet making the phonics connection.

This does bring an older tale to my mind, which may explain why "iguana" is more familiar to him than "lizard". (This will be an oft repeated story for any of you that know my family, and especially our oldest daughter. I apologize for the redundancy. But it is good blogging material, factual, and can be confirmed by any number of sources.) In May of 1999, we purchased our first house, from which we moved in August of this year. At the time we had one child, a 2 year old girl. The house had been occupied by owners of a full-grown pet iguana. We didn't know this, and there was no need to be told this information. What we needed to know was that the iguana had gone missing 6 weeks earlier and had not been found when we took possession of the house. Our 2 year old was upstairs for a "time out". (This was before our kids became perfectly behaved.) The upstairs was a remodeled attic that still had doors in the walls of her room accessing storage/attic space. She was behaving as a typical 2 year old in time out in her room. She was jumping on the bed in OUR room, looked up, and noticed a creature staring at her from across the very short space between our rooms. So she screamed something about there being a "monster". To which her logical parent (father....mother wasn't home yet from work) informed her that there was no such thing as monsters, reminded her she was in time out and needed to be quiet. The screaming didn't stop, and eventually father went up to deal more firmly with the issue. Discovering she was to his left (our room on our bed), instead of to his right (her room), his back was to the 3 steps that led up the remodeled attic/bedroom. She kept pointing behind him, not listening to a word he said. He finally turned around and was about 2 feet away from this lizard-like creature that had finally ventured out of the crawl space, probably hungry. A little secret here: Mr. SAHM hates snakes and there really isn't much difference between a snake and a 5 foot iguana. When I came home both were at the bottom of the stairs with the door shut. I took the poor, traumatized child (who firmly believed in monsters by now) and prepared to go call the previous home owner (who had rented the house, so we didn't know to whom this creature actually belonged or if it was just lost?). Mr. SAHM felt brave enough to go try to "catch or contain" the creature, plus our little kitten had just ran up the stairs, and the two females, in our rational brains, were afraid it would get eaten by the monster. (Ok, I was a little shook up too.) So, our rescuer opens the stair door and we immediately hear him scream and the door shut quickly. Apparently the iguana tried to follow us downstairs. At that time, I beat a hasty retreat with my child to my parents' house with "Call me when it's gone." It finally was captured, and we dealt with bedtime issues (understandably) for MONTHS that didn't resolve until we took her to the iguana's grave. The thing apparently was unable to recover from such a long fast and died. (We had told her it was dead long before that, but when it truly did die, she was able to see the burial site.) Seriously, it was about 6 months, but we managed to avoid therapy!

Still, it did give her some good "ammo" to use to try to scare her little brother with, very effectively I might add. We put latches, locks, etc. on the attic crawl space doors, rearranged furniture, and dreaded any wind or drafts that caused rattling upstairs the entire time we lived there. Thankfully, our new house, which we've been in since August, hasn't kept any left over pets. Pugs, as I understand, were the pets of choice for the previous owners. At least they are warm-blooded mammals.