Enough with Dead Fish Already!!!

So you may remember that we had the oh-so-brilliant idea to get Braden a fish tank for his birthday last year. Then we dealt with babies being bred by the dozen, and I mean within days people...  And again a few months later...And don't forget we had to get a house sitter when we went to Europe to watch the fish-(nothin' like 5 year old drama!!!)  Now I am no fish expert (as the fine folks at Petsmart will agree) but it seems to me like fish are a lot more involved than one would think. 

Braden with Larry number 3 (I think)

For starters, the whole tank cleaning thing.  One sales person says clean the tank once a month but change the filter every week. Another says clean water every other week and the filter monthly. And another 5 people tell me something else entirely! So now I have it worked down to a system, when the tank looks like the one in the dentist's office on Finding Nemo- I clean it. Now this use to be Rusty's job, but somehow I inherited it... Oh, and I had the brilliant (seriously tho) idea of getting a sucker fish because they eat algae! So my tank is way cleaner! They are seriously ugly though and I won't put my hand in anywhere near it, they kinda freak me out. 

But then there was a whole series of fish dying, 'must be the Ph' they said so we got the stuff to fix that and bought a round of new fish. Then another few drop off and it 'must be the water temperature' so we get a heater. Then we didn't have a 'bubblier' and that must have been why those few more died. Then we got 'ICH'. Which is as gross as its name. It is a bacteria fish get that makes their scales get air under them, painful and gross.  So weeks of daily water changes, plus the medicine for it and a new batch of fish have a squeaky clean home. 

Now you may think I am exaggerating, but I bet if I checked my credit card history we would have bought like 50 fish over the last year. No joke! Currently we have three cute little gold guppies (6 have come home with us in the last week), a sucker fish "Sucker the Third" (first one lasted eons and Sucker the 2nd lasted just 48 hours), and a gold Molly fish.  Monday I flushed the silver Molly "Maggie" after she was attacked by our Beta fish. And I wasn't really sad to see her go because I knew my baby fish days were OVER! The Beta "Larry the 5th" was red this time, instead of blue and that seemed to make him more aggressive. He attacked the three little guppies and took on Maggie who was WAY bigger than him. So he got himself put in fishie time out (a small vase aside the tank to remind him what he could lose). But apparently he couldn't take the separation. He feeds on having other fish around (no pun intended-ok yeah there was) and after a mere afternoon in timeout he was dead. Sad. 

SeRiOuSlY people! I am DONE with the fishies! I swear when these last 5 die out the tank is DONE! Or at least when the other 4 die the sucker won't have anything to eat and he will probably just give up.

In fact it seems the only fish that has managed to hang around a while is Nemo! And he is a cyber pet! EEK! 

So Braden is gonna have to learn to love him some plush fish (thank heavens Webkinz makes a bunch of them)- cause I am so done with the ones we have now!