Whatever will I do with myself now that I don’t have a story to post about? 🙂
“What is it?” asked Brian.
“It’s a Sand Dollar,” Dad explained.
“Why didn’t we find any earlier?” asked Mandy, disappointed. “I would have liked to see more. They’re pretty.”
“Pretty?” asked Dad, looking down at hairy, black circle on his palm.
“Yes, very. Can we take it home?”
“No, we can’t take it home. We can’t take living creatures.”
“Oh, dear! That means I can’t take my kelp!”
“Um, kelp isn’t a living creature, Mandy-girl. You can take that home—you might be able to press it in our dictionary. And if we find a white Sand Dollar, we can take that too.”
“No, Daddy, kelp is alive. Katie told me it was.”
“Well, I suppose you could say plants are alive,” Dad said patiently. “They just don’t want us to take animals—plants are fine.”
“But they’re not plants either, Daddy.”
“I suppose Katie told you that?”
“Yes, she did. Kelp is not in Kingdom Plantae. It’s in Kingdom Protista. It’s algae, not Protozoa, though, so it doesn’t act like an animal. So. . . do you think they’ll let me keep it?”
“Yes, I think so. And, just between you and me, they’ll probably tell you you can take it home because they’ll think it’s a plant.”
The End
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