Wednesday, September 14, 2011

A First at the Schenk's

In the last eight years of marriage Troy and I have never had a pet.  We have talked about it and then always decided it would be too much, even before we had kids.  We did not want to be worried about needing a sitter or someone to come feed our pet so we never had one.  Actually, now that I think about it, I don't think many of our friends have a pet.

We have for sometime wanted to get Gracie a fish.  Neither of us wanted to buy the tank or the ridiculous other things that go with it, when we had no idea how long it would even live.  It was not worth the start up cost.  Someone mentioned that they had a gold fish growing up in just a fish bowl and it did just fine for years.  I decided to try it, plus I had a perfect bowl.  This weekend while we let Daddy get some much needed rest, Gracie and I headed to the pet store to buy a fish.  We picked out  a gold fish for $.27 and some food for a dollar something.  I even let Gracie carry the fish to the car.  She did such a good job and I was impressed how careful she was, she kept telling him not to jump out, which was not possible since he was in a tied bag but still so cute.  We got the fish home and set the bowl up.  Rocks were free from a friend so this seemed so simple.  Plus the store gives you a 14 day return if the fish dies so we at least have a back plan;)

Day one(sunday the day we bought it): pretty good, feed it, talk to it, and watch it swim
Day two: feed it in the AM before work and check on it when we get home.  Water seems a little foggy but someone says to be patient, the fish needs to just adjust.
Day three:  feed fish in AM and water still looks cloudy.  Wondering if this fish has enough oxygen.  Talked to Troy at lunch he was also concerned so he changed out the water and he thought the fish was doing much better.  Gracie and I get home about 7:45 at night and the fish had gone to fishy heaven.

I did not even get a chance get  a picture of Gracie and her first fish whom she called mamma.
thanks to Google you can see what our fish's 3 day life kind of looked like 

What will we do next?  Not sure because I don't want to carry that dead fish around until I have time to make it to the pet store again and well Troy is just a little busy so we will just have to see and I think I will let Troy decide on how to explain this to Gracie:)


2 comments:

Jennifer said...

Ha!! Same story for us except Anna's fish died while we were gone for Christmas (shortly after we got it...what was I thinking getting a fish right before Christmas?!?). #2 and #3 died soon after as well. So we moved to hermit crabs. #1 died and I replaced it before Anna noticed. The next ones lasted quite a while longer and were sooooo easy! No cleaning, just water their sponges every day (they didn't eat hardly any food). The last one died I think because Anna forgot to water it. Whoops. She took the news of all her pets' deaths quite well. I was expecting drama-rama.

The Burgess family said...

Aww, so sorry! I know how this goes though, we've been there too. As much work as a cat or small dog is compared to the fish/crab/lizard/snake we've tried, it seems they stay alive better than those smaller in-a-glass-cage animals, ha ha! I'm sure Gracie will bounce back quick, our kids always do when this happens to us too.