Holland, Massachusetts, that is. Aliya’s teacher and I were both worried that the tadpoles wouldn’t make it through the long weekend so I agreed to take them home with me. Except that “home” meant schlepping them to our camp in Holland (next to Sturbridge). The poor things were sloshing around like they were caught in a tsunami, and Ben’s patience with my passenger-seat driving wore thin around exit 13. We all made it to camp alive and they survived the return trip too. Aliya wanted to take them to the beach but I thought that was pushing our luck a little so they spent the weekend on our dresser.
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They were a lot of fun to watch (for me, anyway…Ben thinks I’m completely “gone”) and surprise, surprise, one of them turned into a frog! It was amazing how quickly Tiny went from a tadpole with legs to a teeny tiny frog. His tail disappeared in about 36 hours. Today I headed out to Petworld to figure out how to keep him alive since he doesn’t seem to be eating the flakes and pellets we’ve been feeding the tadpoles. I guess if they don’t survive it will help with our dilemma about what to do with them when the school year is over. At this point I’ll be happy if he is still breathing tomorrow morning so Aliya’s class can see him. I may have to stay awake all night in case he needs medical intervention. 😉
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Sunday Evening:

I saw these contrails when I was driving back from Worcester last week. I’m sure it was an optical illusion (or the planes took off at different times), but at the bottom of the photo it looks like the two planes were side-by-side and then (“Oh sh*t!”) they headed in opposite directions.
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Last week I chaperoned Adlani’s field trip to the Southwick Zoo. It was fun but between the 1-hour bus rides each way, the time necessary to load about 300 kids, teachers, and chaperones on the buses (twice) and the fact that we only had the buses from 9:30 to 1:30, we spent a very short time at the zoo. The kids didn’t seem to mind, though. There were lots of baby animals…my favorite was a baby monkey and the baby giraffe was also really cool. The kids’ favorite part was when were in the petting zoo and I looked at a hugely pregnant goat and said, “Wow! What do you think is inside this goat’s tummy?” while also rubbing the tummy in question. The goat chose that moment to let loose and the kids all screamed “POOP!!!” Seriously, when I asked them later what their favorite part of the trip was, that was it. As far as I know, nobody got bus-sick, had an “accident” (literal or figurative), and I didn’t lose either of my chaperonees, so the field trip was a success.

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For a while I was doing really well at sticking to my routine of doing a little laundry every day, but then Grandma Ginny was here and took over ALL of the laundry so I got out of the habit. Last week was really busy and I didn’t do ANY laundry during the week and this is what greeted me on Saturday morning:

What I hate most about laundry is the amount of time it takes to do it. If it could be condensed into a 2-hour hardcore laundry session it wouldn’t bother me as much, but it takes more than an entire day to do a week’s worth of our laundry. It almost makes me want to take it to the laundromat so I can commandeer 10 washers and 10 dryers and be done with it. Sometimes I get sidetracked in the middle and a load hangs out in the washer for so long that it needs to be re-washed. And it seems like I constantly have piles of clean laundry waiting to be put away. What I REALLY HATE is when I find something that I KNOW HASN’T BEEN WORN, BACK IN THE DIRTY LAUNDRY!!

The “after” photo doesn’t come close to representing the amount of time and effort it takes to send my family out into the world funk-free:

At least I know I’m not the only one who hates doing laundry:
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The tadpoles in Aliya’s classroom are thriving now that we’ve changed to tap water and I’m helping keep the tank clean. Several of them have grown back legs, which may not seem that exciting except that they are the only tadpoles in the first grade that are metamorphosing (yes, that is a word). The other classes have been borrowing tadpoles from Aliya’s class to study.

I brought in a magnifying cosmetics mirror (do NOT look into one of those!) and it works really well to see the underside of the tadpoles and whether they’re growing legs or whether it’s another poop false-alarm.

The next problem is going to be that there may not be enough weeks left in the school year to allow them to complete their transformation. The other problem is what to do with any that make it to the end of the school year since I really don’t want to kill my babies. (If you missed my earlier post, they can’t be released into the wild because they might not be indigenous to Massachusetts and I’d be responsible for disturbing the local ecosystem.) I’m thinking about using them for breeding stock to supply next year’s first grade classrooms with their eggs. Budgets are tight, ya know.