For seventeen years, I have watered, fed, and bathed my children in sunshine. Unlike others in the animal kingdom, I’ve refrained from eating my young, and refuse to kick them out of the den. They have a comfortable existence burrowed in my soul as we circle the sun.
This weekend my all-in, child-centred approach to parenting was called into question by my twelve-year-old and her arched eyebrow of suspicion. Could she trust me with keeping her faux frog, Timmy, alive while she was at camp?
Could she?
Legitimate question. I was an old lady of twenty when the Tamagotchi craze hit and never owned one. However, I did live in the late 1900s and play a mean game of Mario; would whacking the buttons on the controller and screaming, “Don’t die, for the love of God, don’t die,” work on Timmy the way it worked on Luigi?
Let me tell you, after seventeen years of parenting joys, juggles, and juxtaposition, I have never been so stressed about keeping something alive as I was with Miss C’s GigaPet.
Timmy, the imitation frog, was 38 and 38 pounds when Miss C gave me her stern walk through. Her directions included which buttons to press to feed him, bathe him, and clean his cage. If anything fell below 50/100, he needed to go to the hospital.
“Timmy hates the hospital,” Miss C paused to make sure her words sunk below my sarcasm. “This is discipline. You are not allowed to reward him unless he does a trick,” she commanded.
Full disclosure, in my quest to keep Timmy happy, he got dragonflies without performing a trick on more than one occasion, something my husband said would prevent me from looking after Miss C’s future real-life babies. “If you can’t follow her rules now…”
Hmmm.
“Timmy doesn’t like being woken up. He will get angry, thick eyebrows.”
“Like someone else I know.”
Ever the Desi to my Lucy, Miss C frowned, and waited for my imaginary laugh track to stop. “When he wakes up,” she continued, “You press this button to see what is flashing.”
It is here that I pond-er the health of my twelve-old and this electronic streak I was now charged with maintaining.
After a few failed attempts with Timmy 1, 2, and 3, Timmy 4 had been played for 38 days. 38 days of three times a day check-ins. Could this (and the OG Tamagotchi) be the reason the world was so stressed?
Growing up my brother had a hamster who lost all his hair, and my best friend owned a fish who developed a brown spot you could stick a pencil into; both lived for longer than they probably should’ve. But Timmy, Timmy could perish at any moment if I didn’t constantly keep vigil.
I couldn’t kill a 38-day streak, or could I… The lake was right there when I dropped Miss C and Miss S off at camp. It was still there 48-hours later. Right there…
But don’t call Keith Morrison: Timmy lived!
Clocking in at 42 pounds and 40 days old, Timmy was the frog of high-tech frogs: alive, with a happiness score of 100/100.
Plucking him from my car’s console, I passed him to Miss C so she could inspect her pixelated pet, then waited for Timmy to rat me out for all the extra treats.
Is this how real-life grandparents feel?
Rhetorical questions aside, I now feel compelled to check-in on our pet. “You kept him alive for 2 days, I’ve kept him alive for 40,” a vexed Miss C stated this evening.
Before my husband, Nostradamus, interjects with some sort of statement on my future Granny-self, you will note, gentle reader, who of the two of us was entrusted with this digital frog’s life.