Tadpoles!

We had a couple free hours between the kids’ naps and dinnertime last Sunday, and in discussing fun options for whiling away the afternoon, my wife brought up the idea of going to the pet store.

“Okay,” I said, because that’s what I always say when my wife suggests something.

But then I wondered why we needed to go to the pet store.

“Are we gonna try some new fancy dogfood?” I asked.  We’re constantly tweaking our dog’s diet to find a product that will minimize the farts, maximize poop firmness, and not cause skin reactions.  We have a very high-maintenance dog.

“No,” she said.  ”For the tadpole habitat.”

“The tadpole habi…?” I said.  ”Oh, shit.  The tadpoles.  You’re still talking about that?”

My wife’s friend from work has gotten her interested in raising tadpoles, which the friend does with her kids.  This friend was about to score like a kilo of prime polliwogs, and offered us a stake in it.

In case you’re not a wildlife biologist, the thing about tadpoles is that they turn into frogs.  It’s educational, the reasoning goes, for kids to witness and nurture this metamorphosis.

So all we needed was a habitat for these future frogs.  My wife had some half-baked idea about using a lizard cage or something, but I didn’t even let her get that far.  I put my foot down.  (My foot was so unused to this that it got all tingly and throbby for a couple minutes afterward.)

You see, I know a thing or two about raising tadpoles.  We used to do it every summer when I was a kid and we lived on a tiny Army base on the edge of an alpine forest in Germany.

First of all, you don’t get tadpoles from your friend.  What you do is wade out into a pond until you’re enveloped in egg sacs.  It’s like taking a caper-infused snot bath.  Then you scrape the sacs off of your Toughskins and ooze them into jars, bags, Frisbees, whatever vessels you have.  You also need to make sure that you scoop up plenty of algae so that the tadpoles have something to eat.

When you get home, you fill up a washtub with water and dump the whole mess of eggs and pondscum in with it.  Leave the tub out on the back porch, because there ain’t no way Mom will allow that slimebucket in the house.

In a few days you’ll have about 9,000 cute little black spermy-looking dudes squiggling in the fetid water.

In a week or so, there will be seventy adorable miniature frogs with tails swimming around and sometimes venturing onto the rim of the tub.

In two weeks, you’ll have maybe three viable frogs, and you’ll name them after your favorite characters from Archie comics.

Two of them will be floating belly-up the next morning.  Little Jughead will make it through one more day before he tries hopping to freedom, only to be killed for sport by your cat.

***

The manifold arguments against getting the tadpoles for our kids proved impossible for my wife to counter.  They went as follows:

1. We don’t have room for anything else in our house.  Every horizontal surface is filled with kid junk.
2. The twins, at barely 19 months old, are too young to appreciate this miracle of nature, except insofar as they would enjoy dumping a jar of tadpole water on the floor and stomping through it.
3. We have enough mouths to feed.  I don’t need any more living creatures depending on my marginal competence for survival.
4. Let’s say that tadpole husbandry technology has improved enough since 1976 that one percent of the tadpoles make it to froghood.  What the hell do we do with a dozen frogs?  “Release them into the wild,” you say?  Have you ever seen a frog in coastal Southern California?  We don’t have amphibians here, because there’s no groundwater.  Maybe we should try to raise some critters that could survive once we released them, like coyotes or rattlesnakes.  You know what frogs do in this climate?  They DIE–that’s what.

Do you want to have this conversation:

Baby: Fwoggy sweeping?

Parent: Um, yeah.  Froggy is sleeping.

Baby: Jump, Fwoggy! Jump! *throws frog, watches it land with a thud*

Parent: Maybe I’ll just take the froggy and let him swim in the toilet for a minute…

Baby: Nooooooo…Fwoggy!  Fwoggy!  I wuv Fwoggggggy! *bangs head on floor, develops lifelong inability to connect with living things, strong attraction to bikers*

Because I don’t want to have that conversation.  You can if you want to.