gone with the old, in with the new

Sat. morning I went to go feed our fish (technically Ryan's fish) and discovered the last orange one upside down, stuck in one of the fake plants. oh oh. Not good. Though I knew it was coming. He was looking rather sickly for a while. It was only a matter of time. Usually I would just scoop him out and take care of it before Ryan saw it and hope he doesn't notice they are gone. Ah, the innocence of 4 yr olds....(well, 3 at the time) as we once had a total of 9 fish, and now we are down to 3. All of them I just got rid of them and he never really even noticed they were gone.

This time though he's much more observant, so I figured it was time for the "death" talk. oh boy. Trying to figure out a way to talk to him about death was not easy. Especially since I have it all worked out for if a PERSON dies, but not animals. (the whole heaven thing...since animals don't go to heaven..it was hard to explain it.)

So anyway, I ended up waiting until almost bedtime (bad move on my part) since we were busy during the day and Uncle Darrell ended up coming over and stayed all afternoon and part of the evening.

So he went to feed the fish and I showed him what happened to the orange one. I got a cup and net and showed him how we scoop him up. He wanted to help. He hadn't realized at this point what "dead" really means. He must have thought we were just moving him somwhere else. He even put the fish out of the net into the cup, then from the cup to the toilet. He was even fine with the fish sitting in the toilet. It was when we flushed the toilet and said bye bye fishy that he lost it. That's when it kicked in that the fish isn't coming back. He literally flipped out, started bawling and in between sobs saying "I don't want the fishy to go!!" oh poor thing. I almost started crying! I have never heard him cry like that before.

So I just held him and talked to him about it, being careful not to mention that we will someday die too (as my lovely dear husband had to say when we got back upstairs....thankfully he didn't seem to notice as we haven't gotten the "mommy and daddy die fear" yet). Once he was ok we told him we'd go to the store the next day and get more fish, since we were reduced to just 2 normal fish and 1 bottom feeder.

So now we have a clean tank (thanks to daddy for finally cleaning it!) and some new fish. We got two "mickey mouse" ones....on their tails they have little mickey heads, and 3 neon fish. I think he's officially over the one that died, though he did tell me he hopes these fish don't die.

Ah, the joys and wonders of growing up.