Fish Get a New Home

Have I told you about these fish yet? I couldn't find mention of them in my previous posts. So I suppose they deserve an introduction before telling you that they're environment has changed.

As you may know, when we moved to Sacramento, Scott assumed the calling as an early morning seminary teacher. For those of you who aren't familiar with our church, this involves teaching the scriptures to high school students at ungodly hours in the morning.  Namely, seminary starts at 6 am, which is way before I'm able to open my eyes, much less put a sentence together. However I did attend seminary when I was in high school and didn't have seem to have a problem with that hour back then.

Anyways, Scott has tried to make his seminary lessons interactive with games and visuals so as to make the morning hours more meaningful to these teenagers. It seems like each lesson Scott prepares has to out-do the previous one.

One evening as Scott was preparing a scriptural lesson based on the principle of stewardship, he had an idea. He wanted to give each of the students something that was his to have stewardship over for awhile and see how they could take care of his belongings. Scott asked his mother (Queen of All Visuals) if she had any suggestions. Immediately, without giving any indication of what she was preparing, Martie left for the store. A few hours later Martie returned with 25 gold fish, fish food, canning jars, and other such fish supplies. She wanted to give them fish!

I wasn't for the idea. I said, if you give these student 15 cent goldfish in a lesson on stewardship then you are setting them up for failure. Those fish will die in less than a week! I've had personal experience! Once I won goldfish at a BYU-I Halloween carnival on a Friday night. I named them... Piggy and Kermit. I bought them a home. They were dead by Sunday. I haven't attempted to own pets since then!

I wasn't wrong either. By the next morning when Scott delivered the fish to seminary, one of them had already gone to fish heaven. But Scott decided to give the students the fish anyway... mostly because the students REALLY wanted them. When Scott returned home that morning, he hadn't dispersed all of the fish. We kept probably seven or eight, and over time, as I predicted, most of them died. Surprisingly though, three of them have swam against the stream and survived their siblings.

Until the other day they lived in a vase and remained nameless. Martie though had had enough! After asking Scott to find them a better home and greener seaweed accessories without response, she finally went to the pet store for their new home (pictured above). They are really thriving in it too! I think it's because they have the opportunity to swim not only vertically but now horizontally too!

At this point (if you're still reading) you're probably thinking that we spend way too much time talking about these fish. It's probably true. If you have pets, you may have witnessed Scott's Dr. Doolittle-type attraction for animals. With the fish, though, most of the time we are actually talking about how we hope they don't survive until the summer because I'm NOT carting them off in a medical school move. Any volunteers to take them off our hands if they live longer?