The Great Tadpole Rescue

In early June, Joshua wanted to catch tadpoles in the pond. I told him it was too late, all the tadpoles had grown into frogs. A few days later, I was looking in the fountain and to my surprise, hundreds of teeny tiny tadpoles were flitting around. Now, the fountain is not normally home to little animals. Usually it cascades water and small things don't do well in it. However, my parents had left for a trip and the kids had disconnected the pump and the frogs apparently discovered this.

Now we had a colony of cute baby frogs swimming around. Whoo-hoo! Science in action. I thought we could give them a month to grow up and move out. Unfortunately, when we got back from the reunion, Dad was concerned that the frogs were still reproducing, and worried that he'd never get his fountain back. It was looking pretty green and fuzzy by then.

Dad decided it was time to give the tadpoles the boot. The kids were excited about helping. We caught almost all of them. There were a few casualties, but I think we got them all. Millions of little tadpoles were scooped up into 2 buckets for relocation to the pond. It took several hours to get them all. Marian was very good at spotting the ones that were hiding. Delaney just wanted to drink the nasty water. Oh, and you can see the van getting cleaned out in the background. (Score for me, I cleaned, vaccummed and washed the carpet!)

So, here is how we passed the morning!