A Sad Day

This will be a sad day in our home.

Like every morning, I woke up and went out to the kitchen to make Paul's lunch and start the coffee.
Like every morning, I went to the drawer that holds the remote for the television, so that I could check up on the weather for the day.
Like every morning, I said a quick, "Good morning!" to the tadpoles that are quickly changing into frogs.

But this morning, something on the kitchen floor caught my eye.
One of the tadpoles, the one Carrie named Tiff, I think, had leaped out of the aquarium and landed on the kitchen floor. She had to have been swimming awfully fast to have missed the counter top and landed on the floor.

At first I was a bit nauseous.
Then I was a little emotional.
I was torn between going to wake Paul (I think for moral support more than anything) and just taking care of it myself.
I even filled another cup of water to put her in...just in case she could be revived.

Finally, after pulling myself together, I used a paper towel to pick her up and realized that it was too late for her.

I'm just very sad now.
Zac is swimming alone in the tank. I've put a cooling rack over the top of the tank to prevent him from leaping out too.
Had I known that she could get out, I would have put the rack on the tank earlier.
She was the faster of the two...lots of energy. She swam so fast around the tank. We described her as flighty.
But I never saw this coming.

Who knew?
She was so close to becoming a frog.
Both tadpoles had developed their back legs and were using them to swim. They both had teeny tiny little front legs too. They were also eating quite a bit now. All that was left for her was losing her tail.

It's just so doggone sad.

The instructional guide that comes with the tadpoles says that success doesn't depend on your tadpoles reaching adulthood. Success is measured by how much you learn about frogs. Death is a part of life.

Blah, blah, blah.

Maybe it would have been different if she would have died of "natural causes" or because of water contamination or overfeeding. Those are the things that the instructional manual warned about.

But leaping out of the tank?

Please learn from me...put a screen of some sort on your tadpole tank after your tadpoles develop back legs. The combination of a strong tail and back legs are a recipe for disaster.