September 27, 2008 -The Toad Incident-

An extremely high stress day. I spent a grand total of five hours with my boyfriend's family... minus my boyfriend. Aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins, and I had to brave them all by myself.
You see, today was my boyfriend's brother's surprise birthday party. All of the boys went paintballing to keep the birthday boy out of the way so that his wife could set up the party, and were supposed to be done at 3:00. Somewhere around 2:45, we received a call that birthday boy had just bought 500 more paintballs. What could anybody do? It wasn't like his wife could call him and tell him to stop playing paintball and come to his surprise party. She really pulled it off though, he had no idea at all whatsoever.
My boyfriend's mother and I looked after a few of the little ones for a while before the party to keep them out of the way during setup. I took the two little girls out to pick apples off the trees in the backyard, and one of them found a toad. OK, now this is a really little girl, four years old, and let's just say she was no expertise in the handling of toads. I swear to God I could see the poor little guy's eyes bugging out as she pinched him mercilessly between her fingers, and if you'd like to meet a stubborn little girl, let me introduce the two of you. No matter what I said she just would not put the poor toad down, she wanted to put it in a bucket on the porch, and after a while I just let it go. We were walking back to the house and toad girl steps on an apple rotting on the ground, which happens to be covered with bees. She's in stocking feet, so of course she gets stung. She's immediately on the ground screaming and crying. I pick her up and try to calm her down, tell her it's OK, she'll be alright, when I notice that she still has the toad in a vice-grip. I'm carrying her back to the house imploring her through her tears to put the toad down so that we can go inside the house and fix her owie, but of course I'm not getting through to her. Now, I'm on the porch with one screaming little girl in my arms, a scared little girl trailing behind me carrying the shoes toad girl insisted that she didn't have to wear, about to open the door, when this little girl stops crying and says, "wait, I have to put this in the bucket." She wriggles down, scurries across the porch to a bucket, deposits the toad inside the bucket, trots back over to me, and then commences to sob once more.
We got her a band-aid (because she insisted that she have one) and put a cold cloth on her foot. There was no swelling and she was fine in less than fifteen minutes. God I love little kids. (And I'm not being sarcastic, this is a prime example of their awesomeness.)