“The best education does not happen at a desk, but rather engaged in everyday living – hands-on, exploring, in active relationship with life.”

-Vince Gowman

Do your kids ever ask for things? Not something small like a toy or a new set of pajamas; something big – something that requires commitment and responsibility. Like a puppy – or in our case just recently – a turtle….actually a herd of turtles. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning….

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to find a red eared slider hatchling climbing up into my Nubian bucks’ barn. Knowing that if one of my 200 lb bucks stepped on him, he was a goner, I grabbed him up. My plan was to show him to my 4 year old twins, have a little educational chat about turtles, and then release him somewhere more appropriate and hopefully somewhat safe (although, only about 30% of RES hatchlings survive their first year so safety would be relative in that situation). I have a small pond with lots of water plants to hide in which is where I planned to release him. Insert Morgan Freeman narrating voice: “However, this did not come to pass.”

My children decided they needed to keep him. We already had an aquarium, it just needed cleaned and set up with some substrate and a filter and lights. Fine, I thought. It’s just a little turtle. It has already been educational. We have already learned a little about turtle life cycles and habitats. Keeping him will be ongoing education for the kids and will also let him live his life in comfort and safety. Fine. It’s fine. It’s just one little turtle.

We named him Michelangelo and set him up in an aquarium and gave him some little western mosquitofish and snail buddies from out of our pond. We also added a tadpole but we are pretty sure that Michelangelo thought that was snack instead of a buddy because it disappeared pretty quickly. We learned more about what RES turtles need – feed, light, space, etc. We learned about proper handling and the risk of salmonella. Michelangelo settled in and has been educational and entertaining for all of us.

Knowing that Michelangelo will eventually need a much bigger tank and will likely live until my children give me grandchildren is a bit unnerving but I figure we’ll cross those bridges when we come to them.

Tuesday evening, as I am trying to get the twins fed and ready for bed, my daughter suddenly yells, “Mom, there’s a big turtle in the yard! It’s a big snapping turtle!” Well, she was wrong about it being a snapping turtle but it WAS a big turtle. It was huge. And it was the same species as Michelangelo. A mature, female RES meandering across the yard. Of course, we all went out to see her and learned more about them and how to tell if it’s a male or female. We talked about how Michelangelo (who is too young to tell yet what gender “he” is) was the same kind of turtle but hopefully won’t get that big. We are hoping “he” is a male because males are about half the size of females at maturity so we named him a boy’s name and we call him a he with our fingers crossed. We admired the beautiful female turtle and wondered if she is Michelangelo’s mom. Then I said it was time to let her go on her way and get ready for bed.

Can you imagine what happened next? If you guessed my kids wanted to keep it, you’d be right. My daughter cried for it, she wanted it so bad. She was heartbroken that I said she couldn’t keep it. My son, always the problem solver and mediator, pipes up with, “I know what to do. We just need to make a turtle habitat in the back yard. Then she can keep them all.”

While I love my son’s heart in this, if you know my husband, you would know a turtle habitat will not be going in the yard any time soon – at least not while he has breath in his body. I explained to the kids that Michelangelo was a baby and didn’t know what living in the wild was yet and the odds were against him at his age so we likely did save him from being someone’s snack. But that big female has already beaten the odds and has been living in the wild for years. She would miss being wild and free and she would be sad to be in captivity, even if we did have a turtle habitat big enough for her. Yet another lesson provided by a turtle; perhaps the most important one yet. We have learned up close and personal from Michelangelo. And we have learned about keeping wild animals wild and observing and appreciating them from a distance from the very large female, who then moved on to do her wild turtle things.

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”

-Aristotle