That’s a really good question. I think it’s that they’re more comfortable with me than wild toads so they exhibit more of their natural behaviors more freely. Plus whenever they do something cute I have the privilege of being nearby ready to take a picture. Wild toads are bursting with personality but they’re so reclusive and overlooked I don’t think most people pay them attention.
Here’s a wild toad going about his business just as casually as my toads do:
story time: i taught my little cousin her first longer word when she was very young. i taught her to say “tax benefits”. and to this day my aunt still doesn’t know where she got it from, but it was a hilarious sight to see a little toddler waddling around the house, wearing a big diaper, all the while yelling “TAX BENEFITS!!!!”
My parents did this with me and “nuclear disarmament”.
I taught my little brother to say “micro-surgical vasectomy reversal” (saw it on a billboard) on a road trip, and he didn’t stop saying it for literal years.
My parents taught me to chant “Get your laws off our bodies!” for a pro-choice rally when I was like four and I went to preschool and taught all the other kids the chant and led them on a mini-parade around the playground and the teachers were like ?????????? ?????????? ????????????
whenever my brother threw a tantrum as a baby my parents would chant “live free or die” until he calmed down it was fuckin weird
when i was a kid whenever we got stuck in traffic my dad would say “what the fuck?!?” in a very comic voice and i would repeat it and then he would say it with a slightly different inflection and i would repeat that too and so forth and so basically my poor mother would be stuck in standstill traffic listening to her husband and 4 yr old daughter swearing at each other without end
i’m a preschool teacher and we like to joke around using radical vocabulary with the children, the other day i overheard one kid say ‘this is my truck’ and the other one said ‘no, this truck belongs to the collective’; they all say it now
whenever anyone picks up my daughter or she goes upstairs, she announces “I ASCEND” it’s the best thing
My grandpa has Alzheimer’s so he has no idea who my grandma is but everyday for the last three or four months he brings her in flowers from their garden and asks her to run away with him and be his wife and everyday she says she already is and everyday the smile my grandpa gets on his face is the most beautiful heartfelt thing I have ever seen.