Just before school started our family went canoing down a local river. On our journey my 5-year-old daughter discovered a little inlet filled with pollywogs. Of course the children wanted to keep dozens. We negotiated this down to four lucky (or unlucky) pets. We put the critters in our water bottle along with some cool river water and hoped for the best. I was not optimistic. Over the next couple of hours the bottle rolled around the bottom of canoe occasionally being shaken to make sure the animals were alive. Amazingly when we arrived back at the car, they were still swimming. I was not optimistic that they would make it home alive. Again they surprised me.
Now home we got out an old terrarium and searched the internet for care instructions. We found out that pollywogs prefer pond water. My husband took a bucket down to our neighborhood lake, filled it up, toted it home and after spilling icky water all over the kitchen filled the terrarium for our newest family members. More searching online revealed that pollywogs like lettuce that has been frozen and defrosted so it has a nasty, mushy texture.
Again I was not optimistic and thought they would croak before morning. But I was wrong again.
Every morning since then I have checked their tank and each morning they are still alive. Yesterday I checked and noticed that two of them had started to grow little legs. It seems as if we are succeeding in actually raising pollywogs. With some luck we will release these frogs back into the river in about a month. Again and again I am convinced the will die and they seem to persist. It is an amphibias miracle.
All of this has been happening while I sent my youngest child off to kindergarten. Just two days after the arrival of the pollywogs my daughter received kisses and hugs, waved and hopped on board the yellow school bus. She had a great first day and good days since. She is tired and cranky when she comes home but each night as she sleeps she rejuvenate, wakes up refreshed and hops back on that bus each morning. It seems like a miracle.
Maybe we are able to raise pollywogs because we have successfully managed to raise two children to school age. When we brought home our tiny little babies I was really not optimistic. They were so needy and we had never done such a thing. We consulted the internet regularly, made nasty, mushy food for them and wiped up far worse than pond water. When they were babies each milestone seemed like a miracle. Soon they learned to use the legs they had sprouted and developed more and more skills as they learned to live more independently from us. Now they are hopping on the bus and making their own little lives. Fortunately for me each evening thet still hop home to the terrarium and still rely on me for their food.
I am happy about this because I am not quite ready to release them into the wild.