A Mother's Intuition

You may recall meeting Zoe, our female bearded dragon, in the video below. We bought Zoe a few weeks ago, from the local pet store, after we gave away one of our male dragons. The males were fighting far too much and we thought it was because they were too territorial. So we bought a female. A fat female. Very fat. Suspiciously fat. The store employee assured me that she was just fat...not pregnant.

Yesterday, when I was lizard wrangling and picked up Zoe, her stomach felt very lumpy. Then I realized that she had been digging fiercely for a couple of days. It must have been intuition that I asked the lady at the pet store about the behaviors of gravid females. She told me that it sounded like our female was going to lay. Ummmm...funny that it was the same clerk that told me that she was "just fat." So I bought some supplies to make an incubator...you know, just in case.

We arrived home from picking up the kids and found our little Zoe laying eggs in the tank. I panicked. I called the pet store and they walked me through incubator set up and egg transfer protocol. I ran around the house in a frantic state, like there was a human in the bedroom about to give birth. I followed the instructions carefully. All of the kids were running around screaming, (we don't handle urgent matters very well.) I was sweaty and nervous as I carefully transferred the eggs to the special boxes I prepared for the incubation period. My neighbor and her boys came over to help. We all counted as I dug up 23 eggs. How the hell that little lizard had 23 eggs in her belly...I'll never know! Aiden observantly exclaimed, "Mom, she laid way more eggs than you!" Wouldn't that have been nice to lay eggs instead of the watermelon sized fetuses that we do?

So now we play the waiting game...for three and a half months! I'm going to be a nervous wreck until those eggs hatch... and then I'll be a grandma!!

www.familymattersuniversity.com