Less than a month ago, I shared a very happy story (for me)about getting rid of
(uh...delivering) the last three guinea pigs under the umbrella of the Family Fundom.
In that last email, I told you that the next level of pet passions was the addition of an aquarium to our family room. While typing, I mentioned that the water was "brewing"
and the fish would arrive the next day. THAT, my friends, is where I'll begin....
The fish arrived! We stopped by our local PetSmart store and consulted the very intelligent teeny bopper in charge of all things fishy.We filled our tank with:
* a large white & black spotted fish (named OREO)
* a couple "zebra" fish (named ZEBRA 1 & ZEBRA 2)
* a white fish (named CLOUD)
* an orange fish (named ORANGE)
* a dwarf frog (named FROGGY)
* a ghost shrimp (named SHRIMPY)
* and 2 snails (sorry. no names - just "the snails")
Oh Wow! They are AWESOME! Cool! Look how that one just bumped into that one!
And wow! so pretty! Eww...the snails are gross! I can't find the ghost shrimp, can you?
(ah....the reason for the name.....)
For days and days we enjoy looking at fish swimming around in a tank....swimming, FROGGY is doing the "frog paddle" through the waves from the filter, the fish continue swimming, swimming, eating flakes of yucky smelling crap, and then ewwww....look at the POOP coming out of the fish! is that blood?!?!? Oh the awesome conversations we are holding at our house! What color POOP Cloud pooped and "how do snails poop, Daddy?" Here we are: back to the poop again. I thought we got rid of the poop with the guinea pigs, and we're talking about poop again. This time,instead of cleaning it up, we're WATCHING it exude from the fish's body!
Then ORANGE starts looking a little limp - the back fin seems to be swaying more than swishing. Couple days go by, and ORANGE is stuck to the filter - you guessed it....dead.
Flush #1
All seems well enough. We're on to "oohing" and "aahing" for a couple more days. Then FROGGY is standing at "attention" next to the rock formation we bought to make the aquarium look more "real." We leave him there for a couple days - hoping he's sleeping......nope.
Flush #2
By now, we're getting a little concerned. Within the next couple weeks, we have flush #3, #4, and #5: Zebra 1, Oreo, and Cloud. Oops - forgot to tell you. In between flush #1 and #2, we bought more fish to pacify very disappointed children. So - then we flushed a couple of them with flush #6 and #7.
Well, here it is the weekend of February 8th and we have 2 snails, Zebra 2, and a ghost shrimp (from the original batch). They all seem quite content with our ammonia-infested water. Yep. Went back to PetSmart and got a handy-dandy "you have too much ammonia in your water" tester kit. We also have kept 3 new orangey fish and a sucker fish alive throughout this new process.
The Family Fundom is becoming the Family Flushdom. Now that we are prepared with a do-it-yourself-ammonia-tester, I'm hoping we'll flush no more - - fish, that is. We're running out of reasons why all these fish need to "visit Nemo."
