We have had oh so many troubles with our fish tank recently. I fear it's one of those cases of "what you pay attention to grows" as it seems the more we pay attention to our fish tank and work to 'fix' whatever's wrong with it, the worse off we are. I've had fish tanks for years in my classrooms, all in some form of neglect or another. Every week or so I'd remember to feed them, when I couldn't see the fish anymore I knew it was time to clean it, etc., but all of my fish survived. Yet, once I brought my fish tank home, I can't seem to keep the fish alive. We've killed embarrassingly large numbers of fish in the past year. We've had our water tested, bought the most hardy ones (read: cheapest), found out what days the fish were 'new' at the pet store, and on and on.
Last week we decided yet, again, to give it a go and picked up two mickey mouse platys. Super cute fish. We've had them before and when we had chosen the originals months ago, Nate was super excited because the info card at the pet store read "may reproduce and have babies." The kid was sold on that alone. So, needless to say, when our first pair died, he wasn't necessarily sad that they were gone, just that they hadn't had babies yet.
Well, like I said, we picked up a pair last week, mainly to get the biological processes going in our fish tank again and also to see if these two might make it. We woke up the next morning, I sat down to breakfast and heard Nate exclaim, "They had babies!" I looked into the tank and there they were, babies- little miniatures of the big fish we had swimming around. We only saw one or two but as the morning wore on our eyes got better at spotting them and I've now counted at least 7. Nate had to go to school and we had a talk that sometimes the bigger fish might eat the smaller fish (Nate seems to handle animal death/predation remarkably well) so there may not be many (or any) babies when we get back.
But here we are, a week later and they're still in there! And growing just a bit bigger each day. Unfortunately, one of the bigger fish already died but we've still go the one big one and can't wait to see what happens with all these babies. As you can tell from the photos, not only are they adorably small, they're nearly impossible to take a picture of in the tank as well.
So here we are, growing a boy, food, chickens and now fish. Fingers crossed and hope for the best.
