Just so you know. Never, never, ever buy your child a “Grow Your Own Triops Kit”. They’re available from Scholastic, only in the catalogue, they call it “prehistoric creatures”. That’s so you can’t go online and google “triops” before you buy the kit.

Because when you get the kit? And you hatch the eggs? 

I know! Can we say 'disgusting', children?

Now, Girl1’s three (yes, three survived but the fourth was -mercifully – eaten by her bigger sisters) are not (yet) this big. And as if their very crustacean-ness wasn’t disgusting enough in and of itself, these little fuckers? They shed. As in: moult. As in: discard their old skins and emerge larger and creepier EVERY. DAY. And so there’s always six or nine empty carapaces floating around in the smelly (yes, they smell too!) algae-infested mini-tank they call home. And they look like this:

yuuurgh!

And Girl1? She loves them. Insanely. So I can’t bring myself to do what any parent in their right mind would do. That would be FLUSH THEM.

Well, that and the nagging, irrational fear that they’ll encounter some radioactive waste in the water treatment plant, grow even more massive, gain unnatural intelligence (and malice), travel back up the sewers and emerge from my bathroom at night to murder me in revenge!