Frogs are slimy and I can’t stand touching them. I don’t like to feel them squiggle in my hand. So why am I talking about frogs?
It all started when I transferred to the elementary library. I spent the first year trying to keep my head above water after my third computer crashed. If you’ve ever had to write sheets and sheets of six digit student numbers with the bar codes of the three books they wanted to check out, then turn around and enter all those numbers later, you would understand the shudder that shoots up my spine when I think about another crash. How many books did I lose that year? No idea. Anyway, no way was I messing with decorating the library. Status quo was my motto. 

The summer came, I had survived, and decorating the library didn’t enter my mind. My husband and I went to the coast for a day and visited a wonderful garden store in Morro Bay. I saw these two frogs and that was it. Love at first sight. Now the creative juices started to flow. I added more frogs and then the insane happened. I named them. The kids probably thought I was crazy and the teachers definitely thought I had lost it, but I introduced them to the frogs.

Kids were always asking when was I getting a real frog and I told them never. There’s one teacher who is deathly afraid of frogs and probably would never come in to the library. I’m relieved because feeding the poor little thing would creep me out. Therefore, I compensated and got a fish and he loved to swim up to the front of the tank to greet the kids as they came into the library.

One day I was sitting at the computer, I looked up at my wall covering which was a pond, and a story was born. Freddy and Seymour were going to get a new and bigger pond. Meet Peanut and Honey Beaver, just the right ones to build a dam across the river.  Of course, my fish had to get in there, as Tanks was Freddy and Seymour’s first friend.

Every Saturday I sat at my computer and typed away, my imagination taking me, Freddy and Seymour on many adventures, with ‘gators and wolves and foxes, oh my. Hillbilly bullfrogs, the squirrel crew and a Spanish-speaking macaw are just a few more characters in my books.
 
My husband has been great in his support and encouragement. He gladly read each chapter asking questions to clarify points or point out where something couldn’t possibly happen, but in all he said they made him feel good. Just to note here, my husband is an avid non-fiction reader so this was a big deal to me.
 
My dad helped too correcting all my grammar mistakes and did some rough sketches of the settings.  As time passed, I’ve written several books and now in the process of editing my rough drafts.  When will I have the courage to submit? Soon I hope. Therefore, that is why I’m writing about frogs.

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