My Brother's household pet saga continues...

Last summer, THE BOY SQUAD, including my very dear serial killer of a nephew, Andy, in my Brother's neighborhood had been engaged in the rampant mass murder of tadpoles, dredging them out of the pond behind my Brother's house and placing them in burpable plastic bowls and bombing them with whole potato chips (that dissolved into gill clogging sludge), keeping them long after they died, still calling them by their names and dropping still more chips into the filthy water and insisting they were JUST SLEEPING until the sad, sad little bodies WITHERED into BLATANTLY DEAD tad-husks? Yeah. Boys. *sigh* who of us girls can understand their freakish ways.

So this current summer, my SIL wouldn't let Andy keep any until they had gone to PETS UPKEEP CAN COST ALMOST AS MUCH AS CHILDREN aka PETS B' US and spent many bright, shiny dimes on a tank and a "bubbler" and a fake coral atoll and real water grasses and gravel AND tadpole food...which is nonexistant, by the way. She asked a PETS B' US employee for some.

Her: Oh, there is no such thing.
SIL: But...what do I feed tadpoles?
Her: Oh, you just boil a little cabbage up for them every day and maybe chop up some...
SIL: HA HA HA HA HAHAHAHAHAHA. No, but really, what do people WHO HAVE LIVES feed tadpoles?
Her: *hands her a little jar of Aquatic Frog and Newt Feed*
SIL: Perfectamundo!

So last week, the tadpoles were established in the De-Lux-O-Riffic Tad-THE DONALD-Mansion (deluxe because it had all those little amenities the other would-be tadpole environments in the garages of THE BOY SQUAD members lacked. Just little luxeries, like, say, OXYGEN) and they ate the Aquatic Frog and Newt Feed up like it was made for them or something--go figure.

My SIL said she liked them. She enjoyed watching them, keeping the tank clean, arranging the aquatic grasses and laying out a little sand beach for when the frogs-to-be emerged wanting someplace to spread out their towels. And she really liked how the bubbler gurgled and made the room sound cheerful. But, she especially liked how they were only TEMPORARY pets.

"Eventually," She would tell the children over and over, "Tadpoles become frogs, and you release them."

"These are not FOREVER PETS like our cat TOASTER," She would tell the children again and again. "They are VISITORS IN OUR HOME. We can't FEED frogs, who will want to EAT FLIES and such! So we can ONLY have them until they change."

She was VERY clear and emphatic. Tadpoles=JUST PASSING THROUGH on the trip to FROGdom. FROGS=NOT FEEDABLE BY US. So she worked with them to NOT get too attached...they do not even have individual names, for example. They have been collectively called The Taddies, and they spend their days happily hiding amongst the grasses and purporting to be educational.

Which, they aren't really. Not INHERENTLY.

She realized HAVING tadpoles around don't teach nobody nothing. No one is standing near the tank and having bits of KNOWLEDGE ABOUT AMPHIBIANS seep into their brain pans via bubbler osmosis. SO. She got on the Internet to research what sort of frogs they might turn into, and see what stage they are in now, and how many stages there are, and what their scientific name is and blah blah blah blah blah and the more they looked at different tadpoles found in *insert state here*, the more she came to realize that these things...these purported Taddies...they were NOT tadpoles. Not at all. She had no idea WHAT they were.

Until on one tadpole page she saw a sentence that read, "Newts are often mistaken for tadpoles" and the word NEWTS was a LINK, and she clicked it and up popped a picture of...The Taddies!

SIL: Holy Frogman! The Taddies are...Newts. No wonder they liked the Aquatic Frog and Newt Feed!
Andy-bee: COOL! NEWTS! WHAT DO NEWTS TURN INTO???
SIL:...um...bigger Newts?
Andy-bee: COOL! BIGGER NEWTS! And they eat the newt feed, so we can KEEP THEM! OH COOL! NEWTS FOREVER!
Abby-bee: *arching her back and raising her hands like Olga Korbut sticking her landing* Newts! FOREVER!
Andy-bee: NEWTS FOREVER!!! HURRAY.
Abby-bee: NEWTS FOREVER!!! HURRAY!

SIL: Newts. Forever. Okay then. *punctuated with heavy sigh*