Gambling for Toddlers…. A Tragic Tale.

Keep Up With The Jones Family Instagram or Facebook followers will have noticed yesterday the solving of one of our most frustrating garden mysteries ever.  We finally found the gastropod version of the Rock of Gibraltar.  For weeks we’ve searched for the plump, guilty molluscs who were clearly feasting nightly on our green seedlings by the glow of the moonlight.

Lemonade from lemons and all that, Dadda decided it was a fine afternoon for an old fashioned English snail race.  Candidates were scrutinised and selected whilst a square (yes, it should have been a circle) was chalked out. Athletes poised and positioned…and they were off.  For now.

Baby Dragon was concentrating….Maybe a little too much we later reflected in that marvellous retrospective way we look back and realise our failings growth as a parent.

This photo. Ahh.  Baby Dragon stomping with such innocence atop the racing snails before Dadda even had a chance to realise and react.

This shot below says it all as Godzilla Baby Dragon came back for a crunchy do-over.

“Ee-Yo-Toe killed his snail.”

It was a tragedy….a battlefield….and to top it all Baby Dragon had carefully chosen another juicy victim and whilst the calamity of the race track was being dealt with, he was poking and scrambling the snail inside its shell like the Egyptians extracted brains….but with his finger.

It was when he began merrily plopping his finger in and out of the snail shell like a green fondue…  Even I couldn’t deal with that.  Dadda was to the rescue.

Nevertheless, out of the remains, from the shelly-ashes, slunk rose a silver-trailed leader…a snail more determined than the rest…

The destroyer (as we like to call him) leaned in close…restrained by the hand of Dadda.

…there became a winner.  Shelldon.

The other trainers collected their racing snails…

…placed them at the top of the garden, far away from our (soon to be) lush vegetation…

Snail-trailed hands were soapy-lathered and scrubbed in sky blue buckets…

And as the end of race formalities took place, the winner limped home tragically victorious….Not to his family of course, for they were thrush-bait.

There is a lesson to be learned here, snails.  Steer clear of our vegetables.

They just aren’t worth the risk.