Today I Messed Up by....

Example:

TIFU by hatching mosquitoes in my house

TL;DR today I *kitten* up by hatching mosquitoes in my bedroom thinking that they were tadpoles and subjected my family to mosquito bites


So this actually happened when I was about 7 years old, but I completely forgot about it until I saw a video about mosquitoes today. Anyways, when I was little we used to have a country house with a stream in the back. I was fascinated with the animals, and would often spend hours playing outside, catching frogs and salamanders and the like. Anyways, one day I came across what I thought to be frog eggs. I scooped them up and brought them inside and begged my parents to buy me a tank for them, to which they begrudgingly obliged. I took them back to the city and put them in a tank and waited.

Soon, they hatched! They didn’t look like what I thought tadpoles should look like but I had never seen a live one before so I figured tadpoles are just kinda gross in person. I excitedly showed my parents, who apparently also had no idea what tadpoles should look like, because they allowed me to keep them.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I wake up one morning to see that the “tadpoles”, which had gone into some sort of pupae form awhile ago, are gone, but there are no frogs to be seen. Instead, there are a couple mosquitoes in the tank. It is important to add now that the top of the tank was covered in a mesh wiring, meaning that something say, mosquito sized, would have no trouble leaving the confines of the tank and exploring the apartment.

I am at this point suspicious that what I hatched were not baby frogs at all, and when I get to school I go to the library and take out a book on insects. It is there that I find out what baby mosquitoes look like, and realize that I unknowingly cared for blood sucking parasites in my bedroom for the past few weeks.

At this point I am freaking out because there had been like, a hundred of these *kitten* in the tank, and by now they had probably all escaped and were loose in the apartment. As soon as I got home I dumped the water in the tank down the toilet, but it was too late. My family and I spent the next few weeks waking up to bites. I never told my parents, when they asked what happened to my tadpoles I told them they died.