If I were a far worse parent, this would be a true story. Fortunately for the sake of my son and everyone who will have to interact with him in the future, it’s merely a thought that occurred to me in a real-life situation, and rather than acting on this thought, I decided to file it away in case I ever came across a piece of royalty-free clip art featuring a headless father comforting a child. So the only true part of this story is that my son once caught a tiny frog and put it in a terrarium with a moth. Both animals survived the experience and were released the following day.
A similar experiment involving a praying mantis and a cricket had far more dramatic results.
MRS. SHOEBOX’S ASSESSMENT OF TODAY’S STRIP: Wow. That’s fucked up. Funny, but fucked up.
(Yeah, this from the woman who took photos of the aforementioned praying mantis/cricket experiment)
-=ShoEboX=-
That. was. HILARIOUS! My dad’s an entomologist who works on moths specifically, so I grew up with them around a lot. …And now I’ll have to resist doing this to any future children of my own.
Wife and I were at some workshop thing for parents to teach them to raise children without having everything be a big conflict. Speaker gave the scenario of being in the kitchen with the young one sometime before dinner, and the kid wants the last piece of leftover cake. You say no, and your child of course asks “why?” I leaned over to my wife and said “Because that piece is for the monster in your closet. We don’t want him to be hungry, do we?”
She laughed.
In the years before he could read, we tagged one of our son’s Christmas presents each year from “The Thing Under Your Bed.” Wifey and I always got the giggles when he opened that one.
Something like this happened to my daughter. She had caught a medium spider and was keeping it in a jar. Later, she caught a big ant and decided to feed it to the spider. Darned if that ant didn’t just up and mercilessly kill that nasty old spider. Power to the underdog!
I don’t think it’d be cruel as long as you had the frog and moth elsewhere, ready to give the joke a happy ending..
absolutely horribly funny. I loved it. But where did he get such tiny bones??
In real life, when my boy was 5, we took him to a pet store. He begged and begged us to get him a tree frog. so we did. As soon as we got home, our boy showed it to the family dog. Gulp! Scratch one tree frog.
We got my sisters niece a hermit crab. It didn’t do well and was removed in the night by the girl’s father. For nearly a year, every time we went over, the girl told us “My pet is sleeping.”
Very good one!
On a (sort of) related note: My (then) 5-year old son came running up to me announcing that the dog had taken his hot dog. I said, “Wait, the dog died 3 weeks ago” and that’s when I saw he had taken the box with the dog’s ashes in it, put it on the table and set his hot dog plate on it and was pointing at it going “see, see, I told you he got it!” I’m hoping my child is an evil genius because the alternatives scare me…..
Horrible, but one of the funniest things I have ever read. I quite literally laughed for over 5 minutes straight. I scared the hell out of my girlfriend. She managed to get the second half on video once she figured out I wasn’t crying.