New Adventure

Several weeks ago, M inherited a Backyard Jungle tadpole habitat. We don't live near a pond or water source, so I've asked around to a few folks to see if anyone could track down some tadpoles for us. Everyone is busy. No one ever caught any tadpoles for us.

Little did I know, we had a treasure trove of tadpoles right here, at our house!! :) Tonight, I was bathing M when H called upstairs, "I need you outside right now with a jar of water!"

Um...okay. I can honestly say in 10 years, I've NEVER heard that request before! I left M in the tub, filled up our tea pitcher with water and went to find H. H was digging around in the shed, mumbling under his breath. By this point, I was completely baffled!

"This is suddenly getting harder than I thought it would be," he said to me. I still have no idea what's going on. He rushes in the house and I hear banging around in one of the closets. Out he comes again.

"C'mon." That was it. Just a one word command.

Follow him I did. To M's play area where he plunks himself down by her sandbox. Or what used to be her sandbox. Last fall, I accidentally left the top off. So we just continued to leave the top off in case a cat used it as a litter box, always intending to clean it out and start over again. Then we had a very rainy winter and spring. Now the sandbox is filled with decaying leaves and tons of nasty water. (NASTY water) Since we're hosting a little party here Thursday evening, H was going to clean out the sandbox when he saw the little squiggly, wiggly bodies of the tadpoles.

There were HUNDREDS of them in there, in a variety of stages of tadpole-life. (Even more amazing than actually finding tadpoles at our house, H remembered that M and I wanted some! He got lots of daddy points for that one!)

I don't know why he thought it would be difficult to capture them. We dumped out our sink water and just filled up several containers with nasty sandbox water. Of course, there was mosquito larvae in the water, so I lovingly strained the water with a paper towel to get rid of the mosquito larvae.

I can't wait to share with you the pictures of our tadpoles growing and changing. We're only keeping 5 of them in our habitat. I'm offering the rest to any locals who might want to stop by and take a few home with them.