today is turtle day! you can’t believe how cool it to come home from airplane school, and find a bunch of turtles swarming around the bucket where only this morning there was just damp sand. i rinsed out a rubbermaid tub and filled it with some water and some gravel and sand, and now the little beasts are happily paddling about their new temporary home. so far we have at least 24 of the cutest little snapping turtles ever.

the boy came home from school today, and was instantly captivated by them. for about twenty minutes, then he wanted to go watch yu-gi-oh. i squelched this at once, and had the boy watch them for a while longer. he was really getting into it, and he helped me count them. one of the eggs didn’t hatch. it was a moment of sadness. boy was mad and said that nature sucks because not all the baby turtles could live. i tried to tell him that 24 out of 25 is a pretty good success rate, and that the one that died probably had something very wrong with it, that it didn’t live. and that we could be very grateful for the ones that did make it. boy eventually stopped being mad at nature.

they took so long to hatch, we were thinking that we would have over winter them in the bucket, that is if we wanted to witness the ‘miracle’ of their emergence. or just rebury the eggs near some pond. that could have been a large pain in the ass, so i’m glad they got their tiny reptilian act together in time. we didn’t get to actually see them dig themselves out of the sand, but it is way cool to have the little guys swimming about. now they are living out on the back porch, which will be their home for the next two days or so until we get them out to a nature center near us. they are definitely snapping turtles. i was hoping for something a tad more exotic or colorful, like a painted or spotted turtle. but these little guys are so cute.

its hard to believe that in a few years they will become fearsome denizens of a nearby pond. this is something that i’ve always wanted to do, the hatching out of turtle eggs. it was not the most exciting project, watching a bucket of dirt do nothing all summer long. but it is quite a spectacular finish. 24 little beasts, ancient creatures roaming around on instinct alone, all in a rubbermaid tub on my back porch.