Kids finally get a pet!

We got a new snake this last week and his name is Voldemort. Okay the real story starts about a year ago.  One day when the kids were at school I caught a garter snake in our front lawn.  I thought the kids would get a kick out of it.  I saved it in a big plastic bin until they got home from school.  Jason came home for lunch to see it too.  After the kids came home and they looked at it for awhile, I decided that it was time to let it go.  So, we let it go.  Well, Jason came home from work holding a glass tank and asking where the snake was.  Unbeknownst to me, he wanted to keep it!  His secretary at work's son had been into lizards as a kid so she had given him the tank.  I never had thought about the snake being our pet!  I felt really bad.  Anyway, the tank sat up on a shelf in the garage for many months.  Every once in awhile the kids would ask when we were going to get a pet snake and I would brush them off with the answer of never! Then 3 weeks ago a neighbor girl asked Andrew and Natasha if they would like a lizard, she had two and they were fighting.  (This discussion happened on the bus home from school) When they came through the door that day they were practically hyperventilating.  Since we already had the cage I gave in.  How hard could a little lizard be to take care of? We named him Fred (after Fred from Nim's Island, their favorite movie).  So the kids were so excited that they finally had a pet.  Jump ahead two weeks.  Natasha, Preston, and Adam were playing out in the backyard around 8:00pm.  All of a sudden I hear Natasha yelling "Emergency!, Emergency!" I went out to see what was going on and this black and white snake was slithering on our patio.  I immediately yelled for Jason (he was reading with Andrew) to come.  He knew right away that it was a California King Snake.  He went to pick it up and Natasha said "Who do you think you are? Bindi's dad or something?"  Needless to say the next night we went to a pet store that specializes in reptiles and got Voldemort all set up.  Andrew and Natasha fought over whose room got to house Voldemort.  Andrew won out because he paid for the cage with his own money.  After years and years of begging for a pet the kids now have two, a lizard and a snake.  Hey, at least they don't mess up my house!