Summer Sabbatical and Tadpole Town

It hasn't been an intentional neglect - I have been meaning to post about so many things: the goings on of this summer, Chris' job situation, retro posts to include the boys' birthdays, deciding to send the twins to Kindergarten, etc. But due to the funk and just being out of the habit - time has once again run away from me. But rather than try to do too much all at once, I'll start with a fun new development - what I like to call Tadpole Town. Behold pictures taken late one night in June, when Christopher discovered that we had some tree frogs who were fond of our kiddie pool:

Just having a leisurely swim, enjoying the night in our pool.

What are YOU looking at?

And another new little friend.

In late July, George & Joshua went to visit my parents for a week, and we took Blake to the neighbors' pool rather than clean out the kiddie pool just for him (plus we wanted to swim). So the cleaning of the kiddie pool went undone and unnoticed for about 2 weeks. We had drained it, but there were still a couple of inches of water left, which started accumulating a nice layer of algae, along with a huge dead spider and some other dead bugs. The day I decided to have Chris clean it (yes, this is most definitely a job for him, like most outdoor jobs), something caught my eye when I bumped the pool. A little flicker of movement. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that there were, in fact, tadpoles in the pool. A LOT of them! I counted at least 30. Such a cool thing to see (especially when you have little boys), albeit a bit gross considering that we allowed our pool to become a breeding ground for algae and frogs.

Here are the boys, checking out the tadpoles (as has become the daily custom).

And here are a few of the little fellas:

I have done a little research on raising tadpoles, and it seems as though we may be able to just keep them outside and watch them turn into full-fledged frogs without too much effort. The water in the pool is diminishing daily, and the hot sun has to be almost cooking the little guys, so we need to get them out of the pool and into a nice shady spot with some cleaner water (not to mention that we'd like to use the pool for, oh I don't know, swimming?). But it has been fun to check on them every day. Oh, and for those of you fond of the grotesque, here's the icky dead spider that went from floating to stuck onto the bottom of the pool. Eww.