As long as they use "breather plastic bags" designed for fish transport, I had excellent luck getting Tadpoles on line with 100% shipping survival via priority mail, 3x last spring and early summer. One order was lost for 2-3 days (5-6 day total shipping duration) and they still arrived happy. Plan on about $1 per Tadpole. Agree ... DO NOT buy or locally catch and move Bullfrogs!! I've had them before from a nearby lake and they do very well, but eat anything that they can get into their greedy mouth, including other frogs, fish, bats, snakes, small birds. Theyre born desperately hungry! Mine have grown from 2.5" to full 6 to 8" mature size in one summer! DNR will hate you, because they roam and often get out. They successfully track water can go a couple miles to find a new area to invade. If you like big and beautiful, look instead for Leopard Frogs. They are native to much of US but are getting rare due to loss of habitat and Bullfrog predation*. How can a Frog Person not like this green beauty? Semiaquatic frogs like Leopards and Bullfrogs will jump all over your yard at night (so must seal fence excape areas!) They quickly learn where the pond safety zone is and can take a series of rapid leaps across your yard or greenhouse and disappear under water. Mine can do this the moment I open a sllding door to go outside. If you are trying to introduce frogs from a wild gathered egg cluster(s) note that the clusters might be salamanders instead! Frog eggs within the cluster mass look like little rounded clear jelly spheres, especially visible when the cluster tears open. Whereas salamander egg clusters look like a jelly mass with no visible clear spheres inside, just the growing amphibians. When they tear open, no clear rounded spheres are evident. Both animal embryos within the eggs mass look rounded at first and then enlarge over time. Near to hatching time salamanders embryos elongate and show an arrowhead shaped head with little gills zones on the sides of their neck. It amazes me that a frog or slender little 5-6" salamader can lay a 3-4"+ diameter egg mass. The masses are not large when laid but swell afterwards. When ready to hatch, enzymes are released to largely dissolve the gel, almost in unison, releasing the babies to roam. * WARNING do not put small tadpoles or tiny frogs into ponds with Goldfish of any size. Unless there is a ton of water vegetation to hide in for instance along shallow pond margins, the fish can eat them about as fast as you eat popcorn (and at $1 per amphibian kernal). Even with cover the fish will hunt them constantly. Instead use a 5 gallon tub to the side or partially submerged, partially shaded from hot sun, and a wire cover to stop raccoon, bird or adult frog attacks. Hatched Tadpoles of any kind grow fast and very healhy when using a pond fish food. Suggest floating a few Goldfish or Koi food pellets, which they nibble on as these softens. A few 'Tads often gather around each floating pellet. Thus, you get to see the 'Tads better and little food is lost or spoils. This also helps indicate when to add more food. Make sure to also have some fine leaved pond weeds therein to hide in and nibble on. 'Tads can mouth breathe if the oxygen gets too low in the container water. However, if there is prolonged or marked frantic gulping for air, spread the 'Tads between additional containers. It is warmer in a bucket than in a pond. Avoid full sun locations unless the bucket is inset deeply into the pond or ground. Obviously, do not add 'Tads to your pond until they are large enough to NOT fit into the mouth of your largest fish! If they do not mature into adults the first year in a cooler climate they will overwinter on the pond bottom and finish their cycle the next year. If the pond can potentially ice over, use waterfall flow or small fishtank air bubbler to stir the surface and keep an open zone for air exchange. Otherwise decaying plant matter consumes the oxygen, and excess carbon dioxide and ammonia fumes can build up, killing 'Tads and fish. Much like goldfish, 'Tads will hunt out mosquito larvae in buckets or ponds. In ponds I suggest having 3-4 of the same frog species in hopes of getting a breeding pair so that the cycle maintains. Frogs can live several years and overwinter well. But for a Frog pond to stay "frogged" you are going to need a fenced yard with board blockage to 2-3' high and enough yard and vegatation to support the insect and earthworm levels needed to support the mature frog population. Fish in the pond are important to stop over tadpole = future frog population. In our yard, we keep a lotus tub with lotus to the side of the pond without fish. This is so we can put in egg clusters there when frog populations are low. If you live near a lake or bog lands and hear frogs in mating season, don't fully board fence your yard. Just BUILD IT (the pond) AND THEY WILL COME. Treefrog populations are especially mobile to the right habitat. The above is A LOT of detail and several years experience working to get frogs established in our yards at two different locations. Based on hard won experience it can take years to get right, and is easy with the right match of mostly the right habitat and then frog species. Bullfrogs are easiest but don't do it unless they surround your yard anyway. Local Toad species might work better if you don't have enough cool leafy forage zones for Semiaquatic Frogs. They still need 'Tad growth ponds to sustain.

Hello, All! Hope everyone had a nice holiday season! Like Rosey, I managed to suck up all the local germs while visiting my kids and grandkids... the younger of which are walking virus factories interacting daily with all manner of other neighborhood children and schoolmates... and came home with a nasty chest cold/flu combination. The old guy and I are both sick. I'm glad for things like Vick's VapoRub and antibiotics! I'm a believer in modern pharmaceuticals, as long as I know what they contain and how they work, and whether or not there are more side effects than good effects! My grandson was full blown sick while we were there, complete with fever that makes your ears red and hot, a horrid cough from a tight chest with infection, packed sinuses, runny nose, chapped lips, the whole nine yards. It's the kind of sick that makes your skin hurt! You know you need to eat, but you can't stomach anything. We felt so bad for the poor little guy... and now that we have it, we know what a trooper he was! I'm off to a bad start with the new year... my monitor burnt up, I got sick, and to top everything off, I managed to leave my camera behind when we packed up to come home. I think I did, anyway... I can't find it. On the positive side, H. "Minerva" has kindly waited for me, and is just now starting to open her large buds! And nothing died while we were gone, meaning that my orchids hung in there with the watering I gave them before we left for Christmas. I also have a Gloriosa vine growing tall and looking to bloom, I think. I had thought the corm died in the pot, but when I gave it a small drink to moisten the medium a bit, it began to grow! It will be interesting to see if it does bloom, as it's growing in an east facing window. Nice photos, everyone! Josh, that is such a wonderful Catt! Well... trying to get caught up with reading and posting, taking my time through this cold. I sure hope no one else gets it... it's a nasty one! Talk at ya all later!

flyleft, My son does have ADD. He was diagnosed at the children's hospital when he was 15 and yes, it is the inattentive type. He is a very different boy with treatment and the support of a therapist. His diagnosis was rather late and many years were wasted blaming his problems on other things. I was thinking of this in context of the strong willedness of the OP's son because I would also have described my son in those terms. After we dug deeper and got his diagnosis and then got some help he started to accept that his attitude was not helping him any. He is doing much better now, is more pleasant and also seems happier. He was also a very anxious and often depressed child, very anxious young teen, before we got help for him. I even took him to a center for anxiety for almost 2 years of therapy! This was at a major university where they specialized in this sort of thing. I asked repeatedly of the therapist at the anxiety center: Is there a chance he has ADD? She insisted repeatedly: No. Well, she was wrong and when I think of the years wasted on an incorrect diagnosis I cringe. But anxiety IS part of ADD too. Lots of people, professionals included, associate ADD with destructive wild behavior and fail to realize it has other forms. So when I hear strong willed and anxious I can't help but wonder if there's more to this picture. ADD might be an issue.

Geogirl has a good point. There may be services available to your son--but you have to know about them and ask for them in order for him to get them. Again, my nephew's disability is physical, so not an exact comparison to your son, but he is also completely mainstreamed. And that has caused some problems, because he's not in a special ed classroom with a special ed teacher who knows about all the resources. There's a ton of adaptive equipment that the school has, like rulers and compasses and protractors, but no one thinks ahead that during math lessons that use these, it might be a good idea to have them in the classroom for Nephew to use. He can't hold or move a standard ruler very well. But the classroom teacher doesn't know they exist, and the special ed teacher never sees the lesson plans. So what happens is that a week is spent sending notes back and forth between home and school and finally the necessary adaptive equipment is identified and located and given to Nephew. And then the next week, the class moves on to a new lesson topic. My brother and SIL have found that they need to really be on top of some of this stuff and remind the teachers repeatedly, to make sure that Nephew gets what he needs. And this is with a school system that is really trying to work with them--from the start they have been very willing to try new things, to keep Nephew in a regular class (he has health issues so a home nurse accompanies him to school daily), to really try and get him the best education possible. I can't imagine what it would be like with a school system that had less money or no desire to really work for Nephew. My brother constantly gets, "Sure, we have X equipment. All Nephew has to do is ask for it." But it can takes days or weeks to find out the school has the equipment. My brother finally broke down and asked for a list of every single piece of adaptive equipment the school system has, so that they can ask for things without spending days sending notes back and forth. It's the little things like this--yes, the school can help, but you have to know what to ask for in order to get that help. And if you don't know the help exists, it's pretty near impossible to get that help. I would encourage you to ask about other options and find out what's out there. Pull-out sessions, one-on-one aides for certain subjects, extra tutoring, whatever the school has to offer. Ask other parents what support services their kids are getting. And when you identify a specific problem, be it that it takes your son half an hour to figure out what the homework assignment is or that after weeks of your working with him, he still is not grasping a specific concept, go to the teacher and ask what can be done to address that issue. The regular classroom teachers aren't going to know everything that's available, they have too many kids with too many different needs in one classroom, but they should be able to help you find out what's out there, or point you in the right direction.