A Reason for Tadpoles

People keep telling me that kids just get more and more difficult as they get older. 

Sure, the story goes, newborns are hard. But after this initial hurdle, your average four-month old is an immobile blob of placid joy. It's all downhill from there, they say. First you have to start cooking for them, then they start crawling around and destroying your home (fact), then they start walking and drawing on the walls and running into traffic, and then, once they start talking, they just don't stop. The questions ("But why?") start coming, and then the opinions ("NO"). And the questions become harder and the opinions more and more obnoxious until they finally move out, at which point the child, now an adult, becomes merely expensive and disappointing. 

Bundle of Joy.

Obviously, none of this applies to me. MY kid is going to be angelic, friendly, successful and emotionally stable even through her teenage years. Just like her mother was (HAHAHHahhahahaha...HA!) 

Ruh-roh.

But there is one thing about her impending childhood that I'm really looking forward to, and that is Doing Experiments. 

It was my favorite, favorite thing as a kid. Kitchen science (volcano, anyone?). Investigating bugs under a magnifying glass, and perhaps accidentally frying a limb off in the process, thus Learning an Important Lesson both about the relationship between heat and light and also the fact that with great power comes great responsibility. Making oobleck (by the way, when I lived in Malaysia we had nothing like the oobleck they're doing there these days).  Playing with prisms and colored lights. Toying with magnets. Hunting for treasure with a crappy metal detector. You know. The good stuff. 

Project!

So far the Noodle is, of course, not yet interested in any of nature's unexpected delights, since she's still coming to grips with the banal. Gravity, for a start, is something she battles daily now that she is learning to stand (my money's still on gravity, generally). And then there is everything else we take for granted by the time we're five years old. 

I point out an unusual-looking dog; she is closely inspecting a tiny piece of floor crud. We got stuck in a massive rainstorm with my friend James and she couldn't stop staring at the rain where it hit the ground and bounced back up. I showed her a little inchworm in the park; she tried to eat it. 

But anyway, her interests aside, I now have a great excuse for indulging MY interests and therefore we have now got TADPOLES. Yay!

These were "rescued" from near certain survival in the rain-cover over our friend Gustav's mother's swimming pool. We had gone over to help (okay, watch) them pump out said water and fill up the pool for the summer, but the pump was broken, so instead we spent the afternoon grilling ribs and watching zillions of tadpoles slither around in the muck. 

My little frog puppies.

And now about 20 of them are slithering around in a container in our living room, to my endless joy. I've been feeding them tiny pieces of boiled-to-death green beans and cucumber, and they appear to be doing well. My dear husband is utterly disinterested, as are the cats, who appear not to have noticed that there is a container of swimming treats by the windowsill. The Noodle is only interested in splashing the water, so she is no longer invited to assist in their upkeep.

If they make it to young adulthood (after they grow legs but before they get jumpy) they shall be released into the pond of a local park. I saw some heron-looking birds there yesterday, so I'm certain they won't be bored. Wish us luck!