Sins of the Mother

I am so in the "dog" house…sort of to say. I have failed Frankie in the biggest of ways, and I don't know if I can make up for this one.

Last Saturday was Petco's Pet Costume Contest and last Tuesday was the a pet costume contest at our area Petsmart. Frankie and I have spent two months getting ready for these events. I spent all of September making Frankie's fantastic Frankasaurus costume. He put up with being paper mache to make a model for his shell and endured several fittings to get everything just right. With hours invested into one super costume, I think Frankie was looking forward to entering those pet costume contest.

In pervious years he placed in every contest he entered so he got several gift cards from Petco and Petsmart from $5 to $10 each. Then he won the AARP pet costume contest and the You Pet Costume contest. All in all, he brought in about $200 in gift cards. The winning went straight to Frankie's head, not necessarily because of the notoriety but because of the gift cards: Frankie became a shopaholic.

Every time we would take Frankie to Petsmart or Petco for a walk he would pick out various items to buy with "his" gift cards. He bought cuttlebone, orchid hay, a yellow ball, some turtle treats, and he even bought a big water dish for his friend, Rose the Water Dragon, and bought cat food for our cats. Frankie was not a miser with his "gift cards", he shared his bounty, but he really got into the shopping.

Putting up with the new costume was worth it because Frankie was looking to more gift cards from the pet costume contest. Everyone who saw his Frankasaurus costume said he was a sure win.

Except mom forgot. Oh yes, I forget the PetSmart costume contest on Saturday and forgot the pet costume contest on Tuesday. I forgot both! Zip! They just passed me by like it was April.

Frankie seems to have a very little grasp on the concept of time other than days are longer in summer and it's hot and days are shorter in winter and it's cold. But somehow I think he knows I've missed the costume contests.

Can he forget being paraded around in a costume and being fussed over by hordes of people and strange animals dressed in people clothes? No, I think those kind of things Frankie remembers.

The other reason I think he know I forgot is he did some remarkable rearranging of the gecko room on Wednesday (the day after the missed costume contest). He moved chairs, containers, boxes, garbage cans, his feeder box, the box turtle container and all his hay and grass all over the gecko room. There was grass and hay all the way across on the other side of the gecko room. Some one (or in this case, some tortoise) had to drag all that hay across the room and stuff it under the gecko shelf. I didn't do it.

I am not sure what I can do to make this one up. I am thinking of taking Frankie in his Frankasaurus costume to Petco on Halloween and let him pick out some cuttlebone. I just know that I had better do something because I don't know if my gecko room can survive another Frankasaurus rearrangement.