The Bird And Turtle Campaign

     A couple of days ago my youngest came to me and asked if he could do some chores to earn money. I was busy at the time so I made a few suggestions and went about my business while he started sweeping and cleaning windows and doing a few other things and then he asked me for five dollars. What?! What the heck does he think this is? I'm not the President handing out wads of cash and hoping for the best. This needed some serious investigation, so I asked him what he needed so much money for. "I want to buy a bird." I suddenly had a memory flash of him asking me how much bird seed costs. Okay, I'm a little slow sometimes, but two and two were adding up to four and I didn't like it a bit.
     I could feel my blood pressure rising and I said, "We are not now or are we ever getting a bird." For crying out, loud where would we put it?! We would have to have a big cage and I had friends who had birds and the feathered things were always kicking stuff out of their cages and onto the floor. I don't think so.
     We have already had five dogs, cats until I became allergic to them, a snake, a rat, mice and fish. Not to mention that my boys are not above collecting wild snakes they happen to come across, spiders, ants and any other creature they can keep in a Home Depot bucket, so when I finally, after a long while convinced the boys we were not getting a bird, they were silent for about two seconds and said, "How about a turtle. We'll take care of it and feed it and everything."  Ha!!! Like I haven't heard that one before.