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Okay, enough feline stuff. I almost forgot to write about Sunday, the afternoon spent lounging out at the pond while the kids splashed about and caught tadpole/frogs. Russ was feeling a bit better, enough to be out and about building new quarters for our rapidly growing poultry. The guinea keets are already resembling mini adults but with camouflage brown feathers. The Rhode Island reds already have enough wing feathers to fly up to the edges of the pens and roost. We have so many different breeds of layers, it's interesting to compare growth rates and habits. Hopefully the guineas will help to reduce the deer tick population...these tick borne diseases are scary!

Sunday was hot and sunny, too hot to do much in the garden during midday. I washed a week's worth of dishes with Nina and Vincent's help, then made a chicken salad for lunch. Then it was off to the pond. I mostly do lifeguard duty, sitting in my lounge chair watching the kids. There is a steep dropoff so I have to keep constant watch, but the kids seem to know where it is and how to avoid it. I initially swam across the pond a few times to cool off, but that was enough water time for me. The water is cold in the middle; I'd say its cold enough to raise trout, but too cold for me to spend too much time swimming in it. When I was Nina's age I could spend all afternoon in the water, and she is even more so--a regular mermaid. She has even gone swimming in Lake Superior at Park Point beach in September, not bothered one bit by the water temperature! So I suntanned and read a bit of On the Road while she swam, Joe played with the Tonka heavy equipment, and Vincent caught tadpole/frogs.

At what point does a tadpole become a frog? Does it just spontaneously go to the water surface and take its first breath, trusting that its lungs are ready? Does it go back and forth between lungs and gills for a while? We now have a minnow bucket containing several leopard frog/tadpoles in various stages of metamorphosis. They are more frog than tadpole, breathing on the surface and propelling themselves with newly developing legs, but they still have tails. I had never really seen frogs in that in between stage before.