Freddie

Even before I ever got pregnant, I knew that I would want the sex of the baby to be a surprise, so when the time came for us to potentially find out whether we were having a boy or a girl, we politely declined to find out.

Of course, this has all kinds of ramifications when getting ready for the arrival of the baby. There's the obvious problem regarding what kind of clothes to get, but also, decorating the nursery becomes a problem.

So, we did the same thing that everyone does: we painted the nursery yellow and green.

And for some reason, I like frogs. So, we made it a frog theme, but tried not to go overboard. I really didn't want frogs all over the place. We found a bumper set with some cute frogs on it, I made some crib sheets out of frog fabric, and we bought a gigantic frog named Freddie and put it in the room.

Freddie is so big that we used to take a monthly picture of Fellan with Freddie in order to judge his growth. We tried doing the same with Marxo, but as with all second-children the novelty quickly faded.

As the years have passed and we've accumulated more and more stuff in the kids' room, Freddie had to give up his spot on the floor and sit on the foot of Marxo's bed. But, she eventually got too tall for that, so he's been shoved between the dresser and a storage basket for the last couple of months.

Until last night...