Little Brothers

Cherish your little brother, you'll miss him and his antic's when he's gone, I do. Children take informtion literally and most childred never know to ask about the "details" when they are asking a question. Let me tell you an unforgettable story about my little brother, Cory, at the age of four.

After much begging from the four of us, our mother had finally given in one day and let us go down to the little creek that flowed through our property. In that little creek lived another "world" full of exicting creatures; frogs, tadpoles and so forth. The four of us were eager to reach into the water and retrieve the prizes we saw swimming in the water. Each of us caught several of the frogs and tadpoles and a couple of minnows. We put them in the old coffee can we had taken with us with some of the water out of the creek. We were so excited, we took turns holding and inspecting each one of the creatures before returning them to the coffee can and the water. My little brother, Cory, was holding a frog in one hand and a tadpole in the other. He said, "Mom, why do they look alike but one has legs and the other has a tail?" My mother told my little brother, "when the tails come off, they turn into frogs." She didn't say anything more. You can guess what happened next or maybe not.

Cory dissapppeared one day and my mother sent me to find him. I found him alright. He was down by the creek and had a coffee can beside him where he put his "prized" catches, several tadpoles. He was sitting on the bank beside the little creek and reaching into the coffee can, taking one tadpole at a time out of the can. He proceeded to pull the tail off the tadpole and held the tadpole up to "see" if it would turn into a frog. I asked him what he was doing; he told me he wanted to see the legs pop out when he pulled the tails off. And he reached into the coffee can, picked out another tadpole and pulled the tail off. I had to go and get my mother to stop him for he had several "tadpoles" lying in the grass next to him on their backs with their mouths still moving. Not one of them had turned into a frog.

When my mother arrived, she stopped my little brother from "murdering" any more tadpoles. She made him put the rest of them back into the water. She explained that it took time for the tails to disappear on the tadpoles and that the tadpoles need to grow bigger before the tails start to disappear on their own. She also told Cory that the legs would begin to grow on their own and wouldn't just pop out when their tails were taken off. She made him promise not to come back down to the creek by himself unless she was with him.

The next time we set out on a learning adventure our mother made sure that no details were left unexplained.