A Polliwog's Tale

This is a story about a little girl who graduated from preschool a couple months ago and her pet polliwog.

Studying polliwogs was one of the last lessons they did before summer break.   And don't even think about calling it a tadpole....it will be a good ten minutes before you will be able to get a word in edgewise.

On the last day of school, the girlchild comes home with said new friend in a sandwich bag with strict instructions to feed it fresh boiled lettuce everyday. 

Boiled lettuce.  Everyday.

Oh, really.  Over the course of the next 6 weeks I meticulously boiled lettuce and fed it to the polliwog a grand total of zero times.  The tadpole managed to survive just fine on goldfish flakes.  We kept the creature on the kitchen window sill so that we could remember to feed it we could watch it's ever changing, and metamorphesing body.

As a free range child myself, we used to catch tadpoles...because back then they were called tadpoles....by the thousands and keep them in a mayo jar in some non-disclosed location.  I can't honestly remember if we ever really fed them or what, but every so often we'd take them out of the jar hold them in our little muddy hands and then put them back.  And then one day my favorite sister of all got sick.  Really sick.  Beaver fever sick.  And so tadpoles were banned from my childhood.  I can honestly say that they never captured our attention long enough to pay attention to their teenage-tadpole years.

Fast forward some uncalculated years and I have a polliwog sitting on my kitchen counter.  Turns out it was pretty fascinating to actually see the shrinking tail and emerging legs.  Did you know that they actually form their front and back legs under their amphibious skin and then one day they just pop out fully formed?  I did not.  And now you do too.

After the changing was done and the creature could be identified as a frog, the inevitable question came.  "Mom, can I keep him??  Please!"    And while it was pondered for a nanosecond it wasn't to be.  Because after all, where would he live?  He can't share a house with pinchy the crawdad. Because he is currently doing jail time for massacring the goldfish.  And Wally the welfare fish would eat him in a heartbeat.

But isn't he just the cutest little thing?

So we set him free to find his own way in the world.