A New Pet-Sitting Challenge

I don't have much amphibian experience, unless you want to count a brief period during my childhood when we had a goldfish. His name was Gigolo. He died a precipitous death, and now that I think about it, it's possible that my mother killed him. She played a fairly large role in the loss of my two other childhood pets too, and it's only now that I'm connecting up all of the dots. She says that his bowl was too small, but I've never been sure.

The other two pets were parakeets. One of them flew out an open window after my mother let her into the room. According to my mother, who was the sole witness to the incident, the other parakeet flew into the sink while my mother washed dishes. The bird got covered in grease, "caught cold," and died in the night. Or maybe my mother just got tired of picking up tiny, circular poops from the tops of all of the doors in our house.

Anyway, the reason that I've got pet death on my mind is that I've just returned from Kara's. I didn't go yesterday because I was in the throes of sickness. When I looked in on old Froggy, I noticed that the food I'd put into his little cube on Saturday was still floating on top of the water. He hadn't eaten it.

I ended up giving him 4 foods today, because he kept thrashing around in the water and knocking them to the bottom. I wasn't sure from Kara's instructions whether he eats things once they stop floating, so I kept popping in fresh ones. She was very clear, however, that the most she ever feeds him in a single day is 2 foods. Finally, I admitted to myself that I wasn't going to feel good about leaving until he ate something, but that he was very unlikely to eat. As a solution, I dropped in one final food and got the hell out of there. And now I'm worried that he may die. It wouldn't bother me if he died of natural causes, because we've all got to face that at one point or another, but I would feel terrible if he died because I starved him through incompetent feeding.

I think that my sentiments were intensified by the fact that I'm on the Gatorade-n-broth diet myself today, and I want to eat actual food so badly that fantasies of chewing bread have been distracting me all afternoon.

I've learned today that I don't know much about frogs. Maybe he doesn't eat every day. Maybe the thrashing is normal. Maybe the laying on his back at the bottom is normal. Do they eat food off the bottom?