Cruz caught this frog in our yard last week. We have toads on our farm, but I have never seen a bullfrog here before. There is no pond on our property, but we do have a deep ravine that runs the length of our twenty acres. Maybe the bullfrog hopped out of the ravine.

I didn’t believe our eight-year-old son when he told me his toad was swimming. “Do toads swim?” I asked Scott (Scott is my husband if you’re a new reader here). “Please don’t drown the toad!” I yelled over to Cruz up to his knees in our sprinkler box.

We have a large sprinkler box, about the size of a medium size kids’ plastic swimming pool. It contains all our sprinkler valves and it’s been flooded all winter long. The rain hasn’t stopped in months. This sprinkler box has become a pond in our backyard. That’s where Cruz found the bullfrog swimming around.

“It really is a bullfrog,” I called over to Scott when Cruz shoved it into my face on Monday evening. Eye to eye with the frog, I was so surprised it wasn’t a toad.

“How did a bullfrog get in our yard?” Scott asked.

“I have no idea. Maybe he came down the flooded ravine,” I said.

However that bullfrog came, he changed our lives last week. Usually, when Cruz and I get home from his school, before his older brothers arrive home two hours later, it’s a fight over the screen. Cruz loves video games and it’s a constant battle to keep him from spending his afternoons zoning out in front of Fortnite.

When we moved to our farm, we purposefully did not buy any video games or subscribe to cable TV. You could only watch a movie at our house. Cruz wasn’t even born yet, neither was his older brother Garry. We had five kids and two of them were toddlers. The oldest, our girls, Cami and Lacy, were young teenagers. They didn’t have cell phones yet. Facebook was a brand-new thing they weren’t allowed on, and our daughters loved watching Laverne and Shirley videos. Luke, our oldest son was hooked on I Love Lucy reruns. The days were so sweet, so innocent, and then came the Internet.

One Christmas after the Internet exploded, the grandparents got all the boys iPads, except for Luke, he got a Playstation. Cami and Lacy got cell phones and Scott relented and let them join Facebook. I joined Facebook too to keep an eye on the girls, though I wasn’t happy about it. “Great,” I said, “Now we’ve all drank the Koolaid!” I was kind of kidding, but a few years later, it really did feel like we’d allowed poison into our house.

All our boys became screen addicts. I would hide the iPads to get them to go play outside. Once they were on the lawn or in the orchard, they had a great time being boys, but if they had the choice, they would select the screen over the great outdoors almost every time. To me, the great outdoors really had become “great” because it was so great when everybody went outside.

Our simple life on the farm with I Love Lucy and Laverne and Shirley disappeared. The girls eventually went off to college after Scott made the rule no cell phones upstairs. “Our house is a sanctuary and I don’t want kids from school calling you at night and making you cry,” Scott announced when setting the no phones upstairs rule. Once the girls got iPhones it grew even worse, even though we battled it. Now kids could text mean things too.

And then there was the mushroom cloud of social media. What a nightmare for teenage girls. Everybody got to see who was at the party and who was not invited. It didn’t take long for our girls to abandon Facebook and turn their own phones off themselves.

“I just need a break,” our younger daughter Lacy said one day with tears in her eyes. I took her phone and put it on the basket on the counter that was there to hold iPhones so we could all be a family again. “I so agree. I need a break too. Maybe this sweet old basket will eat our phones.”

Do you need a break from your phone, Facebook, or Fortnite? Do your kids need a break? I’ll be honest, I needed that bullfrog last week. The frog felt like pure grace because I hadn’t even prayed for it. I’d thought about a hundred other things that might break our youngest son’s screen addiction, but never a bullfrog.

Every day after school, as soon as Cruz and I parked in the driveway, he ran to find Bobby his bullfrog instead of plowing into the house to turn on Fortnite, which by the way I think is the worst invention ever in the history of boykind.

Albert Einstein said, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” And that was before Fortnite or the Internet even existed. Einstein also said, “Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”

I really think it is criminal that a whole generation of boys are submerged in video games up to their eyeballs. And parents (at least good parents) are exhausted trying to save their sons from Fortnite formaldehyde.

When I was kid formaldehyde was used as an embalming agent. Frogs, baby pigs, and other critters were preserved in jars of formaldehyde in my school’s science classroom.

Today boys are embalmed by this video game. Scott and I have fought hard to keep our sons from becoming Fortnite zombies. We have succeeded with our older boys, they don’t play much anymore, but I fight Cruz over this game every week. He gets upset when I turn off the TV and tell him to go outside, but I am determined to win this battle.

I refuse to let my boys waste their imaginations on something someone else has already imagined for them. A game I don’t even like. I am emotional about this. Video games are robbing boys of their childhoods.

If you are fighting this video or Internet battle in your home, or have even lost the battle and frankly, my dear, you don’t give a Rhett Butler’s damn about it anymore, I’m praying God will send you a bullfrog to remind you how important frogs are for boys.

Bobby the bullfrog has these big ole eyeballs that stare at me with great emotion. Have you ever looked into a frog’s eyes? I never had until last week. Einstein also said, “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”

Since looking into that bullfrog’s eyes I understand better. Instead of just turning off the screen, I need to replace Fortnite with something far better. Something my son absolutely loves, like a bullfrog named Bobby.