Yes, the “Pet Rock” is a real 1970s novelty item created by Gary Dahl. No, I didn’t have one of these… my bizarre pets were much weirder!
Hello Tired Troopers!
Have any of you ever had or maybe currently have a weird pet?! Well, buckle up, because I bet you one if not all of these weird pets are weirder than any you’ve had or even heard of!!! I’m such a weirdo! 🤦♀️ I’m telling you these are just bizarre!
There used to be a concrete irrigation ditch that ran straight through a park. And I mean straight through it. Honestly it was super dangerous because it ran right through a huge grassy area and the entire area was sloped, so if a kid or dog or whatever were running you honestly could miss seeing it and fall right in! Idk who’s bright idea that was, but it was definitely there when I was a kid! I just recently took my kids to that park and I’m happy to report it has been completely removed!
However, it was there when my sister and I were kids, so of course we played in it! In doing so, we found out that teeny tiny snails lived in the underwater grasses that grew on the sides of the irrigation ditch. We showed our mom and she harvested some and put them in our beta’s fish bowl when we got home. It was super cool for us as kids and super cool for mom, because she figured the snails would help keep the bowl clean, win, win! Which they did, until our beta fish started devouring them one by one! Uh, oh! Then, Mom had another idea, maybe they sell bigger snails at the pet store. That way it would still help the bowl stay clean and our fish couldn’t eat it!
And voila, she got a larger snail, about the size of a large marble. It was super cool to look at it as it crawled all along the sides of our glass fish bowl, and it did a good job of keeping the bowl clean too! It ate left over fish food and a water plant Mom stuck in there. Life was good. My little sis became so attached to it that it became “her” pet. She named it ESCAR-GO. Yes, even as children we knew what escargot was because our mom ordered it for us once on a trip. Which in itself is a funny story, see my blog, “My Sister’s Published Story”, if you’re interested…
Well, sadly, snails don’t last forever, so ESCAR-GO passed away. Mom couldn’t bring herself to toss it without letting my sis say goodbye, so she put it on the windowsill until we got home from school. We ended up having a little funeral for it and everything! We dug the tiniest cutest little grave, sis made a card for the snail, Mom said some words… When my sister went to place the snail into its final resting place, it, uh, slurped out of its shell and landed splat into the hole… sis was shocked, I started laughing, sis looked at me and I said, “It’s ok, look! Now you get to keeping his shell to remember him by, he doesn’t need it anymore, so he gave it to you.” Phew! Tears and crisis averted! It was just so cute, until it became absolutely disgusting and hilarious! We still laugh about it to this day!
Now, I’m not excluded from the “weird” pet club by any means… I’ve had a couple… one was an ant farm. Ok, not too weird, but man, when I was little and found out what an ant farm was I just thought that was the coolest thing! To get to see them build their little tunnels and do their ant thing up close?! Magic! So, Mom being the best Mom ever, got me a little ant farm kit. Now, this was back before you could order anything off the internet, so I don’t know how she pulled it off, but she did! I was so excited! We followed the directions and days went by, then weeks, and nothing happened! None of them built any sort of home, nothing… i have no idea why it didn’t work, maybe my kit was missing the queen? Who knows, but it was a huge dud and disappointment!
My mom was also in the “weird” pet club as a child and also a victim of disappointment from it. Back in her day there were advertisements on cereal boxes and in the backs of magazines where you could mail in for random “cool” kid things. She came across an ad for Sea Monkeys! Um, magical!!! The ad was magical too! This is how they marketed these Sea Monkeys:
I mean, are you freaking KIDDING ME?!?!?! Of course any little kid would do backflips to get these things!!! Absolutely magical!!!!! And it says they’re easily trained?!?!?! Whaaaaaa??? I can literally hear the millions of kids now going, “Pleeeeeeeeease Mom?! Plllllllllllleeeeeeeeeaaaaaaassssssseeeee?! I’ll take care of them I promise! Look! It’s only $1!!! Oh pleaseeeeeeeeeeeaaaasssseee Mommy dearest?!?!?!?!”
Well, my Grandparents sent in for these for my bright eyed Mama. She said she was so excited when they finally came (through snail mail). She set up their little habitat and followed the Manual of Sea Monkey Care. Then, when she finally saw some swimming around she looked super close and they were… bugs! They weren’t the adorable fantasy creatures pictured on the box! Her little heart was broken! Grandpa had to explain to her that they were in fact, brine shrimp. How horrible, right?!
If you don’t know, this is what a brine shrimp is – Nooooooooot so magical, huh?!
And back to me again… in the 4th grade our teacher brought in crawdads for us to learn from, science, etc. She kept them and used them in class for a few weeks and then had an “adoption program” to let us kids try to take them home as pets… well little me thought that was just too cool! I don’t know, maybe it was the fact that my teacher churched it up by calling it an adoption that you had to apply for… Who knows! But I wanted to adopt one of those little crustaceans!
I went home and asked Mom, she said no. (Of course, right?!) But I begged and pleaded and made all the promises and we weren’t using our fish bowl at the time… well, I wore her down and she agreed! I was so excited! Probably because of the “official” adoption part… pretty genius of my teacher, really. So, with the adoption paperwork finalized 🤦♀️😂 I came home the proud parent of a crawdad. We stuck it in our empty fish bowl where it had all it could ever need… or so we thought!
I named it Cee Cee. Well a few weeks later I went to check on Cee Cee one morning aaaaaaaand she was gone! What?! How could that even be possible?! I ran and told my mom and she came with me and yep, fish bowl was definitely empty… oh crap! So we looked around on the counter, on the floor, etc. Nothing. Then we heard a noise coming from the kitchen sink, but still no Cee Cee. Then, we heard it again!
Somehow that little 💩 jumped out of the fish bowl, crawled into the kitchen sink, and fell into the garbage disposal!!! Oh NOOOOOO! Mom grabbed some kitchen tongs and tried forever to fish Cee Cee out of the garbage disposal. Nada. Then, she figured, well it’s got to be good and pissed at this point, maybe it will grab onto the tongs and I can pull it up. That worked! She got Cee Cee out and back into the fish bowl. We stuck a book over the top to be safe.
Well Mom convinced me that it was time to let Cee Cee go, obviously it wasn’t happy in the fish bowl, so I agreed. We ended up releasing it at the duck pond at the same park that my sister and i had harvested those tiny snails! Don’t worry, it was the perfect habitat for it! Big ol’ pond, not too deep, tons of food. It was a crawdad’s dream! So, happy ending for Cee Cee!
Ok, I saved the “best” and “weirdest” for last… my sis and I loved going to the pet store! I mean what little kid doesn’t?! It’s like a tiny zoo/aquarium with all sorts of tiny animals available to bring home?! Yes, please! Well Mom had a thing for Beta fish, they were small, pretty, you could only have 1 at a time, relatively clean, low maintenance fish PLUS my sis and i got to “have our own pet”! Again, win-win!
Well, one day we are at the pet store when i see a tank full of jumping crickets! What?! What are these exciting little things?! I have NO IDEA how I convinced my mom to buy me these damn things, but she did! She bought me crickets! I had no idea at the time that these were actually just kept as food for the reptiles! You know, the actual pets! Ugh! Well, because they were sold as food, they were all put into a clear plastic bag filled with air and tied off. It was like having a balloon full of these bugs! She also bought me a small plastic tank to house them in because obviously I couldn’t keep my gazillion new little pets in the plastic bag! I told you this one was the weirdest!!! By far!!!! And it gets worse…
A few days after getting my little cricket buddies, somehow the lid came off and my bedroom was FULL OF CRICKETS! I freaked!!! Not because my pets all got loose, but because suddenly my bedroom was full of creepy crawly BUGS! It was like the moment they escaped, I realized they were icky bugs! My mom caught most, but it was impossible to catch all of them, so for a few weeks I would wig out when I would hear one chirping it’s little cricket song late at night… ewwwww. Whole thing still gives me the heebie-geebies! And no joke, to this day, I’m afraid of crickets!
