No more Fish!

Biff the fish died last Saturday! We no longer have any pets. This is a picture from about a year ago, when we had three fish. The fan tail gold fish died a couple months after this photo was taken. Then we were just waiting for our enormous gold fish (Biff) to die. They told us that if they survived the initial month after being bought from the pet store...(And we had like 30 die)...that they had life spans of up to 8 years! We had 5 live for about 5 years. Then they slowly started to die off. And every time one of them died, Biff would get bigger. Some one told us that golf fish would grow to the size of thier tank, so as the unoccupied space got bigger...so did Biff. It was amazing. He was a little bigger than the width of this 10 gallon tank. Everyone who saw him couldn't believe that we had a gold fish that size in our house. They all said it was the biggest gold fish they'de ever seen. I know he was the biggest one I'd ever seen. We had this golf fish before we had kids. And we just got him from WalMart. Only paid like 10 cents for him. But he seemed to bigger than the others at the store, and we just knew he was a "survivor". We named him "Biff", because he was the biggest, and another fish, "Marty" because he was the smallest. (Some of you might recognize those names from the movie: Back to the Future.) We got these fish just after we got married, so we had them before we had kids. So it was a little sad to see him "belly up." But I knew the day was coming soon... He'd been acting "old" for a while now, and he seemed real lonely after the other fish in the picture died. (That fishes name was Tubby.) It is an interesting thing. Anyway. We are keeping the tank, and will probably have fish again, but not until we are in a more "permanent" residence. The sucker fish (that is also in this picture) was given to Breanne's preschool teacher. We don't know what his life span could be, and we wanted to be "done" with the tank. So he now has a good home with some more fish to keep him company. And we are now.....Pet-Less.

I'm just realizing that this is the longest blog entry I will have done... and it's about my fish. But I needed to document this, and here I am doing it. I guess that is what "blogging" is all about...journaling. And I really was sad when he died. Not like when a dog dies or something that severe, but it was sad knowing that some little piece of our lives was over. That the little thing we had taken care of for so long, was no longer around to take care of. I think the thing that I will miss the most, is the way the babies watched the fish with such wonder! I used to sit Joshua, in his highchair, right in front of the tank, and he would watch them and get all excited. And all of the others have had a similar reaction as soon as they could see them. Good times!