Remember Those Tadpoles?

Remember how we saved a bunch of tadpoles and took them home? Well, weeks and weeks later, we finally have at least one teeny weeny frog. Yesterday we also had one, which I picked up and put down a couple of times, only to learn that wittle bitty fwoggies do not like that. It died minutes later. This morning, yet another wee polliwog became a frog--apparently ingesting his tail overnight. I feel terrible about the one I man-handled and have decided it's definitely time to release all of them--I don't have the skills or equipment to care for these incy wincy amphibians any longer. 

TA-DAAPOOOLE!

Of the original flock cloud, only around eight remain*. All the rest went in one of two major die-offs. I don't know what happened the first time, which was about two weeks after we'd first installed the tadpoles in our home. Suddenly the water was a murky mess and half the critters were floating around looking grey and hollow. The second massive die-off was entirely my fault: I had run out of boiled lettuce and cheated by dropping in just a tiny bit of, um, bread. Fail.

Almost frogs (or toads?)

For anyone who cares to know, here are my major tips and tricks for the successful raising of tadpoles. Assuming you consider eight almost-frogs out of 30 tadpoles a "success": 

1. Change their water every few days. The new water should be de-chlorinated. I put tap water in a big glass jar in the sunshine for a few days, which seemed to work. Sometimes I also added a little fresh tap water, but I guess in Vienna the chlorine levels are so low it didn't hurt anybody. I reckon in many other cities tap water would basically be an amphibian death sentence. 

Also, not changing the water is very bad--I'm pretty sure that's what was behind mass extinction one. The water should not get even a little bit cloudy - not at ALL. You'd think that was fine, since tadpoles live in filthy puddles, but it is not. I'm sorry, duders. I drowned you in your own goop. 

How do you go about changing tadpole water? What you do not do is try to individually spoon the tadpoles out, because you have better things to do, like change your actual human tadpole and make lunch or whatever. What you do is take out all your decorative rocks, pour the whole mess of water and tadpoles through a fine sieve (poop<"fine"<tadpoles), and dump the tadpoles into a bowl of clean, de-chlorinated water. Tap tap tap your sieve! Those suckers can be sticky. Put your rocks and your tadpoles back in their aquarium, i.e. their big glass tupperware with no lid, which is what we used. Add water as necessary. 

How the Noodle looks to a tadpole.

2. Direct sunshine murders frogspawn. We put our container on a table next to a big plant whose (non-toxic) leaves sort of gave it some shade, and anyway it was not in direct sunlight. Also, somewhere on the internet it says that mint and some other herbs and plants are toxic for fwoggy woggies, so beware. I'd be more specific but I can't really remember and also there is Google. 

3. Boiled lettuce. Feed them lettuce boiled down into nothingness, which you then chop. You can freeze little chunks in an ice-cube tray (a whole ice-cube would be, like, five times too much for one feeding of 20 tadpoles, though) and drop them in every two or three days. Do not feed them bread. I'm sorry, little guys. I didn't know. 

4. Don't touch them. They die. I'M SO SORRY, little frog from yesterday. 

Have fun growing froglets! 

----

*A flock? A pride? A murder? A group? According to the internet, the author of one book about clusters of animals says it's cloud, but scientists use school or shoal. Let's go with cloud. 

Beached Noodle: Bubble's First Seaside Adventure

Lignano, like any really popular tourist destination, is in many ways just awful. Located in very northern Italy, Lignano has Austria's closest beach. As a result, the place both feeds on and is totally ruined by hordes and hordes of pink, German-speaking mountain people seeking a plunge in the sea.

Sand mouse.

It is filled with gaggles of drunk teenagers on spring-break type trips. The beach is packed with endless rows and depressingly deep columns of umbrellas and deckchairs, all of which are strewn with low-maintenance holiday-makers and their noisy offspring (like us). Long-suffering immigrants march the beach doing the hard sell on shitty trinkets. Miles and miles and miles of beachfront property are filled with medium-sized hotels that range from soulless to cheesy. 

From the neck up, baby.

But the good outweighs the bad: you can always find a room and an umbrella, there are arcades and amusement parks (never been myself, but Gulliverlandia sounds intriguing), they sell ice cream and sunscreen every ten feet, and you have to walk about 100 meters from the tideline into the placid sea before the water gets up to your waist. It's like going to the pool, only safer. The beach is soft and sandy and devoid of all life besides the very occasional mollusk, bait-size fish or crab. And despite the fact that it's 90% Austrians roaming about, you are actually in Italy, and so the fruit and veg, restaurants and coffee are all great. 

I've been there with friends several times over the last ten years or so, and have usually stayed in the same hotel, where you have bring your own sheets and towels and toilet paper and pay extra if you're not going to personally scrub the room clean afterwards (which I'm not, thanks). The mattresses and pillows are salty and lumpy. But every room has a kitchen and a balcony with a table and plenty of chairs, and it's directly on the shore, and in general feels like a home. I kind of love it.

Destruction.

On this trip I asked Clemens, who is responsible for making arrangements (because he speaks Italian and his family have been staying in this hotel since time immemorial) what the rooms would cost if we used booking.com. He looked at me like I was insane. 

"Have you seen Frau Kohlrabi's book?," he asked. (Everyone calls her Mrs Turnip. Apparently her actual name sounds a bit like "Kohlrabi," and she looks like one, too.) He explained that paying up involves a ten-minute wait while the Turnip licks her fingers and flips back and forth through the pages, making notes and erasing numbers with a stubby pencil. "I have no idea what she's doing in there," said Clemens. "Maybe she's just acting important." 

Bubbles helping to dismantle a castle.

We spent the evenings with our friends, drinking vino on a balcony next to the baby monitor. Ten years ago we'd be up all night at one of the truly terrible discos and would sleep it off on the beach. Now we pushed the sleeping baby down past the bars at nine p.m., shaking our heads at the sight of shirtless boys and glittery girls drinking vodka out of hollow watermelons. They were hopping around to commercial techno, showing off their boring tattoos and their very nice bodies, getting it on with randoms, and ultimately vomiting on everything nice. It's actually quite heart-warming. There is nothing more feral and human than a bunch of drunk youths. 

In the early morning Alex, the Noodle and I would go stroll around the mostly-empty main strip. A smashed watermelon, lost hair decorations, broken glass. In some cases you could almost picture exactly what had happened where. 

I should never have let her taste ice cream. She's a machine.

For instance, I tried to withdraw some money from an ATM and realized only after several minutes of pushing diverse buttons (I speak zero Italian) that it was empty and wasn't going to work. Then I noticed that the wall and floor all around the cash machine were covered in big, wet stains. Elementary, my dear Watson, I deduced. The machine must have stopped working some time last night. And then I thought, I should probably wash my hands. 

What has not changed over the years is my deep affection for building sand castles. If Alex and I have one thing in common, it's the fact that we can both really get into crafting something tedious. This year we had the added benefit of the Noodle, who was our personal Godzilla. Her presence also seemed to justify buying all the fancy plastic tools we wanted. Well, her and the fact that we no longer calculate the opportunity cost of beach toys in terms of vodka-filled melons. 



This year, with six of us working to pile sand, hold passers-by at bay and keep each other well-moistened with light white wine spritzers, we managed to do quite the project--a larger-than-life sand mermaid lying around on the beach. Lots of little kids and their parents came by to take pictures and help donate seaweed, shells and blobs of sand. (You know you're in Europe when no one gives a hoot that you've built sand hooters.) 

Noodle, for her part, had a blast at the beach. She was either laughing hysterically at the waves, the sand, the muck and the algae, or she was fast asleep. Needless to say, this was also awesome for her parents. 

First baby beach trip was a great success. Can we go back yet? 

Family selfie!

The youthful hordes I was talking about? They liked the mermaid too.

Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair!

A Reason for Tadpoles

People keep telling me that kids just get more and more difficult as they get older. 

Sure, the story goes, newborns are hard. But after this initial hurdle, your average four-month old is an immobile blob of placid joy. It's all downhill from there, they say. First you have to start cooking for them, then they start crawling around and destroying your home (fact), then they start walking and drawing on the walls and running into traffic, and then, once they start talking, they just don't stop. The questions ("But why?") start coming, and then the opinions ("NO"). And the questions become harder and the opinions more and more obnoxious until they finally move out, at which point the child, now an adult, becomes merely expensive and disappointing. 

Bundle of Joy.

Obviously, none of this applies to me. MY kid is going to be angelic, friendly, successful and emotionally stable even through her teenage years. Just like her mother was (HAHAHHahhahahaha...HA!) 

Ruh-roh.

But there is one thing about her impending childhood that I'm really looking forward to, and that is Doing Experiments. 

It was my favorite, favorite thing as a kid. Kitchen science (volcano, anyone?). Investigating bugs under a magnifying glass, and perhaps accidentally frying a limb off in the process, thus Learning an Important Lesson both about the relationship between heat and light and also the fact that with great power comes great responsibility. Making oobleck (by the way, when I lived in Malaysia we had nothing like the oobleck they're doing there these days).  Playing with prisms and colored lights. Toying with magnets. Hunting for treasure with a crappy metal detector. You know. The good stuff. 

Project!

So far the Noodle is, of course, not yet interested in any of nature's unexpected delights, since she's still coming to grips with the banal. Gravity, for a start, is something she battles daily now that she is learning to stand (my money's still on gravity, generally). And then there is everything else we take for granted by the time we're five years old. 

I point out an unusual-looking dog; she is closely inspecting a tiny piece of floor crud. We got stuck in a massive rainstorm with my friend James and she couldn't stop staring at the rain where it hit the ground and bounced back up. I showed her a little inchworm in the park; she tried to eat it. 

But anyway, her interests aside, I now have a great excuse for indulging MY interests and therefore we have now got TADPOLES. Yay!

These were "rescued" from near certain survival in the rain-cover over our friend Gustav's mother's swimming pool. We had gone over to help (okay, watch) them pump out said water and fill up the pool for the summer, but the pump was broken, so instead we spent the afternoon grilling ribs and watching zillions of tadpoles slither around in the muck. 

My little frog puppies.

And now about 20 of them are slithering around in a container in our living room, to my endless joy. I've been feeding them tiny pieces of boiled-to-death green beans and cucumber, and they appear to be doing well. My dear husband is utterly disinterested, as are the cats, who appear not to have noticed that there is a container of swimming treats by the windowsill. The Noodle is only interested in splashing the water, so she is no longer invited to assist in their upkeep.

If they make it to young adulthood (after they grow legs but before they get jumpy) they shall be released into the pond of a local park. I saw some heron-looking birds there yesterday, so I'm certain they won't be bored. Wish us luck! 

Eggstasy

Have you ever wondered what four dozen eggs look like if you pile them all up? 

Look at the size of these packages of eggs.

My mom called me today and was like, Hey, I'm running late, so can you help me out with our contribution to the homeless shelter? I need you to pick up four dozen eggs and hard boil them for me. And my first thought was, "Goddamn, that's a lot of eggs." 

Maybe this is because I live in a European city, where most of us live in apartments and do small rounds of shopping every couple of days, but 48 eggs seems like a s***load of eggs. An absurd number to cook at once in the comfort of your home.  

But off we went to the store where, lo and behold, you can buy packages of 30 eggs! All in one box! Seriously though. Who needs 30 eggs at the same time?  It seems like a lot, especially because in the United States all eggs are washed before they're sold, which means they need to be kept very well refrigerated and are thus even more inconvenient to store. 

48! In one pot! Would you look at that.

Of course, all food seems to come in comparatively enormous containers over here. Or at least, that's my impression whenever I first arrive. Over time my perception shifts. It begins to seem normal that groceries are sold in a space that could accommodate a couple of long-haul airplanes, and normal that you can buy detergent in a box so big, you require assistance to get it into the back of your car.  

By the time I get back to Vienna I have grocery dysmorphia in the other direction. Our local grocery store, which is the size of a Texas gas station, seems positively adorable. I go around for a week thinking, "My, what cute little cans of tomatoes! I'll put them in my tiny basket next to my tiny tins of tuna, itty bitty wedges of cheese and my weeny little packages of unbelievably boring cereal. Aww, look at these wittle bitty loaves of bread!" After paying, quite often in cash, I skip back to my flat to play dry-goods tetris in the only cupboard we use for food. 

This is how much my daughter cares about the stupendous number of eggs I'm boiling. 

Anyway. Now I'm off to help bake dozens of Christmas cookies that will sit around looking forlorn until some fool, and its always the same fool, makes the poor decision to eat them all. *Sigh*. 

P.S. Look at me all updating this blog more than once every two weeks. 

This is What Constitutes a Major Achievement in My Life These Days

Because Alex and I are adherents of the Path of Least Resistance School of Interior Design, we decided to conveniently locate Nava's diaper changing table in our living room. For the same reason, and because we are almost entirely innocent of either good taste or disposable income, our living room is basically monochromatic: everything is either black or white or a shade of gray. 

But the changing table was made of wood stained a fairly deep yellow, which didn't match, and it was missing an attachment that would have made it deep enough to fit a baby (we'd been laying her sideways). 

So last weekend, we built an attachment and painted it white!

BOOM. White changing table. Shot from below to add majesty.

Um, and that's it. 

Gosh. I was hoping this would be more of a blog post. It seemed like a serious achievement at the time. It involved planning the table extension, dismantling parts of the table, going to the hardware store, having wood cut, sanding the whole thing, nailing new bits together and painting everything twice. All on a Saturday. OH, oh, AND blogging about it. WITH a baby! I think we should get extra points for doing it with a baby. 

Not that our baby can talk or propel herself, or anything, but she does squall* loudly and for no reason for a couple hours every evening, and that made it pretty hard to concentrate. On the plus side, it made it totally irrelevant that Alex could have woken the dead when he was nailing pieces of wood together (at that point I was making futile efforts to calm our hysterical and inconsolable bairn, who was not hungry or in pain but was having her usual 6 pm bout of what I imagine is Creeping Existential Dread). 

Whatever. Fixing up the table was really hard and we are proud of ourselves. 

Here's a picture of our baby. She continues to be by far the best thing we've made. Didn't even have to go to the hardware store. 

P.S. Shana Tova, to those who celebrate it 

* By the way, the expression "a squalling infant" was a cliche I'd often read, but I feel like now I really understand. And we're lucky enough to have what they call an easy baby (knock on wood, salt over left shoulder, etc)!