Strimming Frogs

PROLOGUE

In our house we do pets

We have a cat and a hamster and a long history of keeping small domestic animals. I catch spiders and put them outside rather than kill them. We genuinely don't set out to harm living things- unless of course they are teeny tiny bacteria that make larger organisms vomit- or wasps (these things can and should be destroyed).

In our house we don't do gardening

This is due to the lack of time, knowledge about gardening and motivation to increase knowledge about gardening. After a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with growing our own veg, we returned to soulless multinationals for all food. Grass cutting and occasional plant lopping are the only garden based activities we now indulge in. (Carrots are just too NEEDY while they are in the ground). Our garden is a place to keep the trampoline, shoo the cat towards when he's puking fur balls and occasionally sit in if it's not raining.

In our house some of us do Minecraft

Lego has always been massive for our kids, so this was only a matter of time. 

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One Summer a few years ago I was strimming the grass in the back garden while Madi helped me with her plastic lawnmower. Suddenly, a large adult frog half flopped/half jumped by the whizzing wire and came to rest just in front of us. I stopped all activity and inspected it: 

• Bleeding from nose 

• Laceration to throat

• Hyperventilation (Hypovolemic shock?)

• Two missing digits on left hand

• Left leg at a peculiar angle

• Oops.

Madi, who came from the womb talking, immediately began interrogating me. Why had I stopped strimming? Will the frog be OK? Don't you know you strim grass and not frogs? That was a bad thing you just did. Oh ok, so you didn't mean to strim the frog. It was silly then. I'll need to tell Daddy that you did that. Silly Mummy strimmed the frog.

OK, evasive manoevers failed. Time for damage control. I found a paint roller tray in the garage and filled the deepest bit with water. Madi and I lined the shallowest part of the tray with some of the strimmed grass. We toured the inside windowsills of the house and collected all the dead flies which had buzzed themselves to death in the sunlight. We scattered them in the paint tray too, then gently transferred the injured frog to our makeshift ICU.

The frog just sat there among the bed of dying cut grass, hyperventilating.

So we placed it half-in / half-out of the water. It looked at us and continued to hyperventilate. Maybe they always breathe that fast? Respiration rates of normal healthy frogs were not covered in general nurse training. Madi tried offering it a dead fly, but it wasn't interested.

Over the next few days in between the school run, nursery run, work and playdates, I checked on the frog. It never moved from the position in the tray where I'd placed it. It got gradually more and more cyanosed, then on day 3 it died.

Ah well. I didn't mean to kill it, as Madi reassured me.

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We recently spent a whole day in the back garden shifting 1/2 ton of soil from one location to another to make way for a massive shed garden office.

It was actually quite fun to spend the working day doing something so active. 1/2 ton of soil takes up a lot of room, so progress was easy to chart. The sum total of my physical activity in the day usually comprises of short walks between the kettle, my desk and the bathroom, so being energetic in a work capacity felt a bit radical. The day was not so positive for the tiny inhabitants of the soil however.

With every spadeful of the excavation process, we saw small panicking creatures, scurrying frantically away from the edge of the spade. Running for their lives from the unidentified wrecker of their world. Annoyingly, they sometimes ended up right in the path of the spade, such was their panic and haste to avoid what they didn't understand. I cut at least 3 millipedes clean in half. The severed head ends writhed around for a good 30 seconds afterwards each time. It was not pleasant. 

I had flashbacks to the frog. 
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Minecraft is very big in our house. I have yet to make up my mind about it, having never actually played it myself (for the same reason a recovering alcoholic will not have medicinal whiskey in the bathroom cabinet).

Ethan is the authority on all things Minecraft in our family, having invested the most hours in playing it. The potential for creativity and learning simple engineering principles is huge and having unlimited resources to mould a world of your own design is most appealing. But there have also been a few moments of conflict which have led to the following code of conduct:

• Do not destroy anything you did not build

• If a structure was built jointly, always consult with collaborators before demolition / structural alteration
• Structural alteration includes anything not in the designer's original plans and always includes items placed without his/her knowledge. Waterfalls, lava, portals  etc are all considered to be structural alterations- even those placed as a 'joke'. 

• You may destroy a structure you created, however you must ensure that the resulting debris does not affect any other player

• In the event of accidental damage to another players property, an unprompted apology is appropriate

• Lack of such an apology will lead to a 24hr Minecraft embargo

• If you treat your neighbours well, then you probably don't need nuclear capability.

I don't know whether to be uncomfortable that the rules have to exist, or grateful that they do and we have agreed to stick to them.

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It makes me think: What if the creator of our real live flesh and blood and water and mineral world were as violent and dictatorial as a teenager exploring the limits of his power with 3D textured cubes? 

Or what if our creator were as clumsy and uncaring as a amateur gardner shovelling earth from A to B for a greater purpose that doesn't concern a billion tiny creatures that are simply collateral to be damaged? 

The universe would be a seriously miserable place.

Tadpoles

Since creating a pond in our back garden over 10 years ago, we have been visited annually by some frogs who do their thing, leave their spawn and disappear again, leaving us proud owners of a tadpole-infested pond which has gradually become devoid of fish (probably because they’ve all been eaten…or suffocated under a layer of ice in the Winter as we never remember to float a beach ball to keep an air hole open, as recommended). But I like frogs better, anyway.

However, since the end of last Summer we have had no pond, having filled it in to increase grass space and reduce the likelihood of drowning one of the kids. Accidentally anyway. But we forgot to tell the frogs, who made their annual pilgrimage back to our garden for their weekend of passion. On finding the pond replaced by a mound of gravel (and an assortment of childrens’ digger toys) they used the next best thing- a piece of crumpled up tarpaulin between the back of the hut and the boundary fence, with about 4” of rainwater in.

Who knows how long the embryonic tadpoles floated undiscovered? Only found them when the weather brightened up a bit and we decided we should do something about the sadly neglected back garden and maybe chuck the tarpaulin behind the hut as it isn’t covering any bike anymore since I gave it to a friend 3 months ago.

Such joy in our household to find out that once again the frogs had visited and once again deemed us to be suitable surrogate parents of dozens and dozens of wriggly tadpoles!

It soon became clear however, that the tarpaulin was not going to be a suitable long-term option. Leaves and gunk soon collected in the tiny artificial pond. An interesting blue-tinged oily scum could be seen when the sun came out. And after an unusually warm week, the water started to dry up, making what was left of it more concentrated. Worst of all was the SMELL. Frogs prefer stagnant rather than flowing water, but the therapeutic limit had been breeched. They were in imminent danger of suffocating in their own filth before being able to sprout legs and hop onto something better on the frog property ladder.

I swung into action. I arranged for the school to take some of them. I purchased a tank so we could keep some ourselves. Then I was given an even BETTER tank from an elderly neighbour, so gave the one I’d just bought to another friend who has a little boy who likes frogs. I even bought one of those little nets you get for goldfish. I collected tap water and kept it on the windowsill in direct sunlight for 6 days so I could gradually dilute their filthy living conditions without poisoning them with chlorine (or was it fluoride?)

Sorted.

Unfortunately there was one problem I couldn’t fix. The tadpoles don’t all want to be rescued. The first few net-fulls yield loads of them. Plus a lot of sediment, clumps of undeveloped spawn (genetic flaws?) and a dead snail. Soon, however, the remaining tadpoles begin to elude me.

By this time, my kids have lost interest completely and are off playing on the slide, the tiny amount of water I am operating in has got so murky I can’t decide where next to dip the net, I’m inadvertently inhaling tiny insects with every breath and am rapidly losing sensation from my waist down (the space between hut-to-fence is about a foot and a half and the veins in my lower legs are knackered due to poor genetics and 3 pregnancies).

After 20 minutes of this I’m seriously hacked off, simultaneously thinking ‘Right I’m off- the rest of you are too stupid to live’ and ‘Oh- there’s another one! I’ll just save ONE more…’

And suddenly I realise just how like the tadpoles we are. Evading rescue because we don’t understand what the net’s all about, what will happen to us when we are plucked from our filthy but comfortable environment, and having no IDEA of the lovely gravel-based tank (containing dechlorinated/unfluorided water and stones for resting on) and the box of flaked fish food waiting for us on the ‘other side’.

And equally how un-Godly I am in this theological scenario. I care about the fate of these creatures, yes. But I didn’t MAKE them. From scratch. Or know them by name. I don’t even now how many I’ve saved so far and how many are left in this gunge which used to be water.

I call it a day before developing economy class syndrome in my legs, prompted by the arguing and whinging from 3 kids who are wondering what’s happened to telly/tea/bath time.

We are worth more than many sparrows, many lillies of the field (Mat 6) and by implication many MANY tadpoles. God is sweeping his net backwards and forwards in a relentless effort to rescue us from suffocating in our own mess and sin.

And in actual fact, the tank is pretty cool.