Elmo Fish

Aidan has a new pet. It's a red betta fish that he named Elmo Fish. There is a rather funny story behind why he got a pet today. Last night at church during boot camp, the youth had to bob for fish as one of their games. Yes, real live fish swimming in a kiddie pool. Gross. Afterwards, there were several fish left over, so Josh and I decided to take two of them home for Aidan. They were just feeder fish and we didn't have a tank or anything to put them in, so we really didn't expect them to last very long. They didn't. They died during the night. But not before Aidan became attached to them. He had so much fun watching these two little fish swim around in a little pyrex bowl last night and made a big production out of telling them good-night before going to bed.

This morning, as I was preparing breakfast, Aidan walks into the kitchen with fish bowl in hand. He says, "Night-night, fish. Shhh, Mommy," over and over. Yep, the fish were dead. Apparently, before leaving for work, Josh had told Aidan that the fish were asleep and instead of taking care of them, he just left them on Aidan's desk. When Aidan wasn't looking, I snuck the bowl into the bathroom and flushed the fish. Unfortunately, he saw me put the empty bowl in the kitchen sink and started crying, "Fish go bye-bye. Where fish? Fish? Where A-a's Fish?" while trying to climb into the kitchen sink to retreive the bowl.

I was unable to calm him down until I told him we would go get a fish. I had already planned on going to the store this morning in order to buy a small fish tank for the fish he brought home last night. I didn't expect them to die that quickly, but now that I think about it, I didn't have any type of water treatment to take the chlorine out and they had been dumped into about 3 different bowls of water throughout the evening. Anyway, I just added a fish to my list of things to buy at the store.

So, meet Elmo Fish.

I listed off a bunch of names for Aidan to name his fish, and he picked Elmo. But not just Elmo. Elmo FISH. That is his response when you aske him what he named his fish. The tank is in his room on his desk and he loves to sit in his chair and just watch the fish.
2 1/2 is a bit young for a pet of his own, but it's just a fish, and a Betta fish at that. There's really not much to taking care of them. It's not the snake that Aidan saw and really wanted to touch at the pet store. I told him he would never own a snake. Not in my house. Especially when you have to feed it a frozen rat. Ewww!