Gastropoda as pets...Ghastly

We are not pet people. Our children had fish for about a year and then I was tired of them so now they are gone. I have a hard enough time of keeping up with the kids activities and cleaning up their messes I don’t need anything else on my to do list. So we enjoy other people’s pets. Lana is very lucky that her preschool teacher has a kitten and a hamster for her to play with. Kyle gets to pester enjoy my parents two cats and any other cat he may find wandering around our backyard. I think that gives the kids enough pet time to grow up normally; I don’t think I am depriving them of anything in their childhood.

Lana has however grown a fondness for snails. It started out with earthworms. In the summer we would find earthworms that crawled up on our sidewalk when it was wet from the sprinklers. Some of the little guys didn’t make it back to the lawn before the sidewalk started to heat up and they were kind of stuck. Instead of stepping on them to put them out of their misery I would just pick them up and throw them back on the lawn. Lana had shed a few tears over the ones that we didn’t get to in time, but the tears didn’t last long as she would find something else to be interested in. Then in the fall the worms stopped appearing and snails took their place. She would pick them up on our way to take Kyle to school and then when we would return home much to my dismay she would still have them in her hands. She would collect even more snails on our way back into the house. After trying to convince her that the snails needed to be outside with their snail family I finally caved in and got her a cup to put them in. For days she kept asking me “why won’t they come out of their shells to see me?” I finally told her they are probably dried up and are stuck in their little shells so we need to put them outside so the sprinklers can rain on them. Well the snails did not make it outside; instead she put some water in the cup. Then to my surprise the snails were soon out of their shells crawling up the side of the cup. Every now and then I would knock them down to the bottom of the cup so we wouldn’t have snails running rapid in the kitchen. Then one night Ronnie and I were cleaning and he asked me what to do with the snail cup and I said let’s throw them outside and tell Lana they crawled out. Lana didn’t cry or scream when she heard this, instead she marched her little self outside and proceeded to gather up new snails to place in her cup. Then she put some water in the cup and got a book to put over the top of the cup. Ever since them we have had snails. They have been the centerpiece during breakfast, lunch, and dinner and they were even at our Thanksgiving dinner. I know it’s mean but I’m okay with this pet because if they don’t get taken care of I’m really not going to feel bad for them, they are just snails, some (odd) people eat them for dinner and here we are eating dinner with them. If they die tomorrow they have lived a good life, for they have made a little girl very happy.