New Pets

We have been bad parents! We have a 4 1/2 year old, that has never had a pet. We decided to finally give in, well, sort of! One of the doctors from Gary's work, was getting rid of his fish tank. He said it was free to a good home, so I guess that home was ours. I have been fighting this, not because I'm against pets, but I remember having fish bowls as a kid, and I HATED cleaning them!! Yes, I know fish bowls and tanks are completely different, but I still have those memories. Gary really wanted a fish tank because Sam loves fish! We made the deal that if Gary would do all of the cleaning and upkeep, we could do it. Gary's deal was that if he was going to do that, I couldn't enjoy Sam's smiles and dimples that were associated with the tank.
It's a 30 gallon tank that came with everything, plants, rocks, heater, light, etc, etc. The only thing we needed to get was a new filter, and a stand.
We surprised Sam with it last Saturday and spent most of the day getting it set up.


As you can imagine, Sam was thrilled! All day long he was asking, "when can we get some fish"?, "hey dad, is it time to go get fish yet"? Well, it's hard for a 4 year old to understand that now that the tank is set up, we have to wait 7-10 days for it to be "ready" to put fish in. So we decided to get some "really cool" goldfish to put in there now. We figured that 3, 13 cent goldfish wouldn't be too much of a loss if the water wasn't in prime condition yet.

So now we have a very nice 30 gallon tank with 3 little goldfish! Oh well, Sam is so happy with those 3 fish, and hopefully by this weekend we can add some real fish and get this looking like a real tank soon.
Here's the sort-of finished product.

Thanks Kevin for the tank, and for putting such big smiles on Sam's face!