UGH OH, THE TOAD

Last night my son ran into the living room, yelling, "Mom, come quick, Kiwi needs help!"

I panicked, thinking she had blood gushing from an injury or something equally horrible. I ran to their bedroom and paused in the doorway. Kiwi had her nose pressed against the aquarium, then she looked at me with tears filling her eyes.

My heart lurched as a flashback to the death of our hamster, Fredrick, filled my mind, "What's wrong?"

Her lip trembled, "I think Theo's dead. Touch him."

I looked in the bowl, and see he's curled up with his face pressed into the dirt. He's a mossy greenish color, unlike his usual gray. I don't want to touch him with my finger, so I brushed a stick lightly across his back. He flinched.

My son, expressing his usual stoicism and impatience with his sister's sentimentality in the face of possbile tragedy said, “He’s not dead, why are you crying?”

I distracted Kiwi before she could get a grip on her baby brother. Otherwise, the night might've still ended with blood gushing.

She started researching toad illnesses on the internet, but the more she searched the more frustrated she became. “There’s nothing here,” she cried, slamming her fist onto the desk. “What do we do?”

As the mom, I’m supposed to have an answer.

But, I didn’t.

I had a horrible vision of us waking up the next morning with a death to deal with before school. Not cool, especially since the kids are so sensitive. Kiwi was already struggling to stay strong and not fall apart.

“Maybe he’s dehydrated,” Kiwi said. She filled up a bowl with water, then squeezed a few drops onto his back.

Then we went to bed.

Before I left for work this morning, I asked by husband to check on the toad before kids woke up. I wanted him to dispose to the tiny body if Theo had passed in the night. I felt horrible putting such a chore on him, but I'd dealt with the burial arrangements for Fredrick last year. Then I went to work.

I got a phone call from Kiwi an hour later. “Hi Mom,” Kiwi said, voice low.

“What’s going on?” Stupid question, I already knew the answer.

“It’s about Theo,” she paused, and took a breath.

I wait for the bad news.

“He’s fine. He’s sitting in the bowl of water.”

Yes, I cried at the news that he was okay. I had to accept my softy status a long time ago. Greeting cards, commercials—especially the one where the little boy thinks the soldier is Santa Claus gets me every time.

NO TOADS HAVE EVER DIED FROM BEING TOO FAT!

I finally gave up catching bugs for the Theo the toad. The weather changed, the pickings were slim, and I was sick of running around the yard with a jar and net every night. My neighbors were always very polite and asked after Theo, but whenever they walked off, I could see them shaking their heads.

Theo had grown large enough that he could eat small crickets, so I went to the local pet store. Small crickets are sold for 12 cents. Did everyone hear that...12 freaking cents. Good grief, if I'd known how cheap they were I would've gone there sooner. I bought a bag of thirty, thinking I'd feed Theo three a night.


Theo was one happy little toad. He finally had food that didn't try and fly away.

Apparently, crickets have a high mortality rate. Well, at least mine did. They started dying fairly quickly. I also have a feeling that crickets are cannibals just like tadpoles. There wasn't much left of their tiny carcasses when I did a body count the next morning. I decided it would be best to place a few extra crickets into Theo's bowl. I thought since his living quarters was more organic than a glass jar, the crickets survival rate might rise.

That night, I dropped six crickets inside his bowl. I figured he'd make them last, right.

The next morning, I looked in the bowl to see this bloated, waddling creature that only flinched when I poked him. Of course this freaked me out. I immediately put him back on a two cricket a day diet, but Kiwi told me, "Mama, no toads have ever died from being too fat."

I'm not sure where she came by this bit of logic, but if it's decreed by Kiwi, it must be so.

Theo- A bloated toad.

Tadpoles are Cannibals!

A couple of months ago the kids and I went huntin’. Yep, that’s right. We took our nets down to the local park, in the middle of our town, and found a pond. The water reached our ankles, smelled like rotten eggs, and the surface crawled with bugs. Little black dots swam along the edges—thousands of baby tadpoles.


I wasn’t sure what type of frogs or toads they’d become. But it didn’t really matter to the kids. They scooped their hands in the water (ugh, so nasty) and I ended up helping (even worse) and caught about eight tadpoles. We had a fish bowl at home and I, in my infinite wisdom (not), decided to let the kids learn about the life cycle of the frog.

Brilliant!

My daughter went online to research how to take care of the slimy, little critters. Youtube has lots of videos, and she learned what type of tadpoles we found and how to feed them. It turn out that toad tadpoles are black and shiny; a brown and slightly bigger tadpole that we thought might be a frog. The ginormous one the length of my pinky turned out to be a bullfrog tadpole, and it seemed sickly. It hadn't even tried to swim away when I scooped it up in the net.

Warning sign #1, ignored.

The next day, I came home from work and my daughter met me at the door with a smile.
"So," I said. "How are the tadpoles?"
"They're all alive. Even the sick one."
"Oh good." I smiled.
She nodded her head, grabbed my hand, and dragged me to her room. "See, all the other tadpoles are taking care of it. They keep cleaning it."
My stomach twisted. "Uh, no, baby. They're not cleaning it. They're...eating it. The tail half-chewed off."
Her eyes widened. "Oh. My. Gosh," she cried. "Mom, why didn't you tell me tadpoles are cannibals!"

The funeral was nice. We wished it well as we flushed what was left of it in the toilet, and consoled ourselves that the tadpole had been dying. We now knew the warning signs and wouldn't make the same mistake in the future. We'd learned our lesson.

The next biggest tadpole turned into a toad within a couple of weeks. Cute little thing. We put him in a separate fishbowl with lots of dirt, ivy vines, and fed him aphids. Which I ended up being the one responsible for catching since my son and daughter declared they were afraid of bugs (I'm a push-over). The other tadpoles were getting bigger, but not at the same rapid rate. They didn't even have legs yet.

The baby frog— I know, I said toad. I was so very wrong. Let me clarify—the baby tree frog grew rapidly with a steady diet of bugs. Then one day, I looked in the bowl and he was missing. Yikes! It happened the week my daughter went to camp so I had to break the news that her frog was on the loose somewhere in her bedroom. I think he fell back behind the dresser, which is too big for me to move.

Darn his little suckered feet. I'm hoping he's still alive, and we're just not seeing him because he's nocturnal, but I'm not holding out much hope.

Warning sign #2, not ignored.

I decided to take the rest of the tadpoles back to the pond so the kids could say goodbye and release them. They were getting too big for the bowl, and I worried they wouldn’t be getting enough oxygen, which turned out to be the cause of the Day of Mass Death a few days later. Unfortunately, the ‘pond’ had dried up, so, I guess I should call it a super, large puddle. All the tadpoles that had been in this body of water were dead. At the time, the kids and I consoled ourselves that we’d saved lives.

Sigh, the relief was short-lived.

About a week later, I woke up one morning to find all but one of the tadpoles dead. It had happened in the night. The water must have gone bad. The lone survivor had wriggled on top of a rock where it was half out of the water. He is the ultimate survivor and I love him so much.

He’s now my cute, little toad. And when I say mine, I mean MINE!

He may be in the kid’s room, but every night after the sun sets, I catch the bugs drawn to the front porch light or pluck aphids off my neighbors rosebushes (yeah, they think I’m a little odd now, shrug). Then I watch over my little Theo until he eats. He’s getting a little chunky and bumpy, but that’s okay. I think he's adorable. Look closely, at the middle of the picture. He's about the size of a penny in real life.

Oh, and don't worry, he's not dead. I touched him and he jumped off away from me.