Our New Pet

On Saturday we had come home from visiting cousins and eating out for lunch. As we were getting the kids inside James asked if he could ride his bike. So I put Grace inside and then went to help James get his bike out of the garage. As I'm rolling the bike out I see a crayfish/crawdad/crawfish sitting on the side of our driveway. My first response was "Oh my goodness, there's a lobster in our driveway". I called Gary over to see and James was looking too but was kinda nervous.

So we decided to ask our neighbors if any of them had lost a pet because it seems unreal that a crawdad would end up in our driveway when we don't live close to water at all. The neighbors had not lost a pet, so Gary got a bucket and we put some water in it. Our neighbor knew how to pick them up, so she put it in for us. We didn't think it would survive because it wasn't looking too good (having trouble standing up and such). So we stuck the bucket in the garage and then checked on it the next day. Turns out he's doing pretty good.

Today I looked up online about what to feed it because it will obviously need food at some point. Turns out they eat leafy veggies, peas, carrots, bacon and a bunch of other stuff. Most people say fish food is just fine for them, but I didn't have any at the house so I went with what we had in the fridge. Hopefully he will enjoy the food, I'll check tomorrow and see if he ate any. I asked James what we should name him. I suggested a generic name like "Fred" and he said no. Then he decided we should call him "Crab". So here are some pictures of our new pet "Crab" the crawdad.




So what do you all call this thing? I grew up calling them crayfish, but I had never seen one this big. Wikipedia says that North-Easterners call them crayfish, Southerners call them crawfish, and Mid to Westerners call them crawdads. I'm going to put up a poll on the blog to see what most of our readers prefer to call them, so please vote!