Lutzenkirchen is a Girl...

This year's caterpillar was already out of the egg when John found it (and named it after one of his favorite Auburn football players), almost starved while we were out of town, and flew away with very little fanfare. We need a new metamorphosis gig...

But isn't Daniel cute??

Gigantor Lives!

Let me state up front that this is a long and rambling story. Sorry about that! A better writer would condense this somehow, but I am a talker, not a writer, so listen if you have time…

My Sunday morning started with an orange juice shower. No, it actually started with me making a (very large) pot of chili at 7:00 am. I have a bad habit of putting off the fellowship lunch preparation until Sunday morning. It’s a combination of being too lazy or too busy on Saturdays, but either way, it results in the family waking to strange smells. Then I headed to the shower, a real one. It was shortly after that the orange juice shower occurred. I wasn’t there to see the scope of it, and by the time I arrived on the scene it had been cleaned up, or so it appeared. Thankfully there were no church clothes involved, since a few of the kids are so short of nice clothes it would have resulted in a serious wardrobe malfunction. So I moved on to getting ready to leave.

Fast forward 20 minutes. I came back down to the kitchen, all ready to go except for my shoes. That’s when my feet stuck to the floor, and I discovered the scope and reach of the orange juice shower as well as the deficiencies of the clean-up effort. Now I have no choice but to mop the floor before church. Ok, I do now realize there were some other choices, but this was my feeling at the moment, which I know some of you can understand completely! I grabbed the two nearest boys who were fully dressed and they began to move the seven chairs and four stools out of the kitchen. One of them began to scrub o.j. off the chairs, too. I grabbed the bag of trash someone had pulled out but not really dealt with and sat it on the garage step (still not dealing with it). Then there was a flurry of super-fast aerobic sweeping and mopping. I ended up quite hot, asked another boy to get me some water, and dashed up the stairs for my shoes. We were still going to be to church on time!

The Story About the Tadpole, Part Two

I don't want to move the link to vote for my friend, Julie B, too far down the page!  Here it is: Progresso Souper You .  Please vote daily through April 12.

And now, back to the tadpole story...

If you haven't already seen it, you should read Part One first...

Tadpole number two arrived one day in May, and it was not 30 degrees! This one was much larger and came in a plastic bag instead of a tiny test tube. I also ordered Tadpole Bites with this one, so we were now ready to be more responsible tadpole owners. We named him Taddeous II. He swam and swam but did not grow. We watched him carefully, and he did not “slosh” over the side. After a couple of months of swimming without a single hint of leg-sprouting, I determined it was too cold in our house for a cold-blooded animal to thrive. We moved the tadpole habitat outside to the screened porch and placed him carefully where the direct sunlight would not boil him in his tiny amount of water. Lo and behold, he sprouted legs about a week later! Taddeous II thrived in his new, warmer environment and soon he had four legs and a shrinking tail. We were going to be the proud owners of a frog!

The Story About the Tadpole, Part One

Well, it's that time of year again, spring!  There are actually buds on some trees, and there is no ice on the pond.  There is a bowl on the screened porch that has a luna moth cocoon in it, and we are cheering it on.  We thought Gigantor (some of you will remember him) {Click the link for an update on Gigantor!} would come out last summer, but, apparently, he decided to overwinter in one of my favorite bowls.  Either that or there's a dead partially-formed luna moth inside.  We will give it some time, but at some point we will cut into it to find out what is there.  At least then I can get my bowl back; that is, if I am not too disgusted to use it again.

All this possibly-failed metamorphosis reminded me of the old tadpole story, which I think deserves a spot here in my blog.  Some of you have already read this...


Once upon a time Edwin's parents gave the kids a nice tadpole, frog, and/or bug habitat for Christmas. It came with a coupon for a free tadpole. Even the folks in the warm south do not have a supply of tadpoles to ship until spring, apparently, so I filed away the coupon and waited for spring to come, at least in the warm place where they breed the tadpoles.

Fast-forward to April. Surely it must be spring somewhere! So I ordered the tadpole, free, plus $7.99 for "shipping." And then I should have gone right out to buy the food and special water for the tadpole. But I did not. I promptly forgot that I had ordered the tadpole.