My Brother is Here, Plus Socks

And what have we been up to lately? 

Let me tell you! 

Well, a week ago we went out to the Danube with friends and family to belatedly celebrate Nava's birthday. Because I am rubbish in many ways, I apparently took only one photo. Here it is! 

Thanks for coming, y'all

I also baked an orange-almond cake and spent much time and effort writing a Happy Birthday message on it. It looked like I did it drunk and left-handed, but I figured my illiterate one year-old probably wouldn't care. In the end it was a moot point since the cake got lightly squashed in the cab and all the words were peeled off along with the aluminium foil covering. So it goes. 

Poorly lit cake photo, prior to brutal smooshing.

Nonetheless, the cake did a fine job holding up a single candle and subsequently transporting ungodly amounts of butter and sugar into everyone's bodies. 

We also used this fine opportunity to release the last five tadpoles into a stand of rushes on the side of the river. It seemed sort of safe, in that it was at least ten feet from a school of approximately 10,000 carp. Some guy who was watching with interest assured us that the tadpoles would be eaten within hours. I did not enjoy his attitude. However, it is true that I had to keep redirecting one of the little swimmers into the rushes and away from the fish. He (she?) seemed quite keen to die, really. 

We did not release any baby frogs. This is because they were all dead. Well, except one. One went missing and is only presumed dead, because of how we have two cats and zero ponds in our apartment. Overall, I don't want to talk about it. 

In happier news, this past weekend my brother Elliott arrived from Los Angeles. It's his ten-year high school reunion. This is significant for me in that it means I am super old. How have those little babies been out of high school for ten years? It blows the mind.  

My brother from the same mother. And father. Also, yes we have a fan and an air conditioner. What about it.

Post-reunion face. Day four.

We are, of course, delighted to have him moping around hungover every morning and cheerily recommending that we cook/go out to eat yet another heart-stopping, rib-sticking Austrian delicacy, generally consisting of pork and onions and potatoes. 

After eight consecutive meals the likes of which I generally try to space out over six weeks, I said: "I need to eat a salad for lunch today. Seriously." 

"Ugh, I'm only here for a week," he said. "YOU can have salad." And then he ditched me to have lunch with someone else. Quite astonishing. 

But really, I see him far too seldom and I wish he lived here. I love my brother. 


And also, Miss Noodle has figured out that socks belong on feet. She just doesn't know how to get them there. Behold: 

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! 

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*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.