When I was a child growing up in rural Australia, there was one summer that was particularly memorable. A biblical plague of insects took over our small town, at one stage swarming so busily that a single air-swipe with a tennis racket left the strings oozing with smelly cricket carcasses. My friend and I would catch as many as we could and feed them to the blue-tongued lizards living around our houses, hoping that if we fed them enough we could make them grow into Godzilla-like creatures that we could take to school and scare our classmates with.

Sadly, they simply got fat and lazy. But boy did they love eating those crickets! So when Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham and his family adopted a young bearded dragon lizard recently, the first thing he did was make a bulk order for live crickets. The crickets soon arrived by FedEx, and a mixture of Christopher’s naivety and inexperience combined to unleash his own personal plague on the family house, leaving his wife in despair and his Twitter followers in tears of laughter. Scroll down below to read the chaotic cricket catastrophe below, and let us know what you think in the comments!

Image credits: jalexartis 

Image credits: _cingraham

Image credits: _cingraham

“This was a conundrum. There was no immediate way for me to transfer 250 clearly active and ravenously hungry crickets from the box to the shallow plastic container we store them in at home. The only solution would be to grab a spare fish tank we had out in the shed, which would take a bit of time, requiring a trip outside in the deep snow and chilling cold. Back at my desk, after all, I had a nearly finished story that was due to my editor. Rather than upend my workday for the sake of $11.50 worth of Internet crickets, I decided to retape the box and store it in a secure location until I had time to deal with it”

Image credits: _cingraham

“Besides my wife, Briana, and I, our house is home to 5-year-old twins, a 1-year-old, three large cats, one beagle-basset mix and one lizard. There was only one place where I thought I could put the cricket box without it getting overturned or split open by a child or an animal: the bathroom adjacent to our kitchen. I put the crickets in the cabinet above the toilet and went back to work. For about 20 minutes, everything was quiet”

Image credits: _cingraham

Image credits: fotologic

Image credits: _cingraham

Image credits: _cingraham

Image credits: _cingraham

Image credits: _cingraham

Image credits: _cingraham

Image credits: _cingraham

Image credits: _cingraham

Image credits: _cingraham

Image credits: _cingraham

Image credits: _cingraham

Image credits: Christopher Ingraham

“Our dragon, whom we named Holly, eats a lot, and the thing she loves to eat most is crickets (typically about 10 a day, in addition to other things like mealworms and vegetables). Briana later told me that she first realized something was terribly wrong when one of the cats suddenly leaped on to a pumpkin pie that had been warming on the countertop. It was going after an unusually large cricket that was munching the filling. I’m happy to report that as of Saturday afternoon, I am alive. The lizard is well-fed. The cats are sleeping deeply. The Ingraham household is finally still. But something’s chirping in the bathroom”

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Here’s what people had to say about the hilarious incident

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