EcoAquarium from Wild Creations

Congrats to Susan Smoaks!

I’ve always loved frogs. They amused me. If I could find a picture of my high school car (aka. “the frog car”) you’d laugh at the fact that I had a green car with frog stickers all over the back of it. Unfortunately, I’m not joking. My 4 year old is obsessed with ducks. Apparently strange obsessions are genetic. My friends bought me a pet frog when I was in high school thinking it would be the perfect gift for me. I LOVED it. Then I realized, “hey, frogs eat bugs.” I think I fed the frog twice before handing it over to my brothers for some unknown method of torture that I’d prefer to stay in the dark about.

We used to have a creek in our backyard and every summer we’d go hunting for fish eggs and put them in an aquarium in our basement so we could watch the tiny tadpoles hatch then develop into frogs. I’ve always wanted my kids to have the same experience but I had a hard time finding a company who would ship tadpoles to Utah for some reason. Now that we’ve moved to California and could actually order tadpoles, I’ve discovered something cooler – frogs minus the bugs.

The EcoAquarium from Wild Creations is absolutely perfect if your kids want a pet but are too young to take care of one. Everything arrives in the mail and it’s so simple to put the aquarium together. You layer what they call “living gravel” and colored gravel (just to make the whole thing look pretty), add a bamboo plant, put your frogs in and close the whole thing up. Once set up, the aquarium has everything it needs to create a complete ecosystem and doesn’t require any care, other than feeding twice a week and changing out the water every few months (now that sounds like a job for my husband to do).

The best part of the whole thing is you don’t even have to open the aquarium to feed the frogs. The frogs eat tiny pellets of food (probably made up of ground up bugs or something but I don’t like to think about that too much) and there is a tiny hole on the top of the aquarium that is just big enough for kids to push a tiny pellet of food through but not big enough that they can try and share their toys (hey, I once gave my hamster doll furniture which she thought was food). It’s so easy to do and my kids love taking turns feeding the frogs. You don’t get to watch these frogs develop from tadpoles but they are cute little things that stay pretty active in their little square world.

A word of caution – you should probably follow the directions. We followed the directions at first. Then my husband decided it would be funny to put a tiny yoda figure in the aquarium (a figure that came out of another frog kit that I can’t make myself order because those frogs DO eat buts). The frogs ignored it for the most part, but we woke up one morning to discover that one frog had battled to the death with yoda. The force, apparently, was not with either of them.

We had an “I-told-you-so” moment, replaced part of the water to try and get rid of anything strange that had washed off yoda and the remaining frog is now swimming happily – a bit too happily. Part of me wonders if he was in on it.

Updated: Wild Creations said that they rarely have frogs die but they didn’t think Yoda played any part in it. They have since sent us new frogs who are still swimming happily nearly 5 months later.

My kids, creative as always, have named the frogs “Ri” and “bit”. They had to carry on their theme from our Insect Lore butterfly Kit when they spit the butterflies into two groups, named half “butter” and the other half “fly”. I could make a bad joke about how “bit”, you know, bit the dust but then it would just be obvious that I’m blogging on a Saturday night. Since I already let that little detail slip, I guess it’s safe to tell you that I’ve been laughing for the last 10 minutes at the great title of the Wild Creations blog. . . wait for it. . . . It’s called, The Frog Blog.

The EcoAquarium really is one of the coolest live animal kits I’ve seen in a while. The simple design looks nice set up in my kids’ bedroom and it is small enough that you can really fit it just about anywhere. I wasn’t expecting it to be nearly as small as it is and I love that it doesn’t take up much space.

Enter to Win

Enter to win a Classic EcoAquarium Starter Kit. This giveaway is open to the U.S. only and will end on June 18, 2010.

This giveaway is now closed.

Please see our site’s Terms and Conditions for a complete list of our contest and giveaway rules.

In compliance with the new FTC Guildlines, please note that this is a sponsored post. I was given an EcoAquarium to review free of charge, however, I was not paid for the review and the opinions are my own.

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EcoAquarium from Wild Creations

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