A Fish Named Abraham

Last weekend I had the opportunity to attend a scrapbook retreat in Bear Lake. It was absolutely fabulous! I was warned that I should stock up on Depends because the amount of laughing would necessitate their use. I honestly had no idea that you really can laugh for 48 hours straight. That includes the time I kept laughing as I was telling Jon about the weekend. It's Tuesday, and my abs are finally slightly less sensitive.

While we were cleaning up on Saturday afternoon, I received a voice mail from Evan. Here's a transcription:

Hey Mom? Um. I got a goldfish at Henry's baptism. So that's pretty cool. But Dad and Carson are gonna try and kill him. So if you don't call me back they'll probably kill him. So yah. Talk to ya later. Bye.

Now - let me remind you that Evan is my easily-attached-to-animals child who hoards stuffeds like there's no tomorrow. The boy mother-hens them all every night by gathering them in his bed and sleeping on top of them. This sadly spoken message really did pull at my heartstrings!

When I got home Saturday night Griff had just dropped the jar with the fish on the kitchen floor. The jar didn't break, and they'd gotten things cleaned up. The poor fish was suffering from post-traumatic shock, and he wasn't swimming quite right. By Sunday afternoon he was still having entire-body convulsions followed by sporadic, backward darts. We put a plastic bucket over his Mason jar (we haven't had fish before so we don't have any fish bowls) to let the poor thing recover.

Evan made sure to check on him while the lights were out. I'm not quite sure how much this benefitted the fish. I mean - how would you feel if you were surrounded by a whiteness that suddlenly lifted to reveal two gigantic circles? I just don't think it would be all that rejuvenating.

While we were getting ready for church on Sunday morning Evan informed me that if the fish did die, he'd like to cook him and take just one little bite. (Evan is also a child that has an incomparable love of all things sea food).

Anyway - we fed the fish some bread crumbs on Sunday night (we also didn't have any fish food), covered the jar with the bucket, and left the poor thing alone. As Evan was climbing the stairs to go to bed he said, "I think I'll call him Abraham."

Abe did just fine yesterday, and we bought him some fish food after Evan got home from school. We're going to hold off on the bowl, rock, and sunken pirate ship purchase for another week. We figured that's enough time to ensure he's recovered and going to be around a bit longer.