Man-child

We bought a fish.

Oh oh oh, rewind! Hmm... when was it... It was a few days after coming home from the honeymoon. I was on the phone with my mom talking about life and stuff, and I was walking around our living room... when I realized... we hadn't taken care of our fish in a while! Joe grabbed the bowl and went to clean it, since it was all green and gross. He searched around for Samson, and found him laying at the bottom of the bowl, belly up, grey... Samson was dead. Super dead.

I was upset about my fish dying... He was, what I call my "child from a previous marriage" meaning a guy I used to date bought him for me as a birthday present last year, but he was dead. And Stupid died too. And all that was left was Hitler and Tomato. So we cleaned out his bowl. At this point I was more annoyed that Samson died, because it was pretty gross cleaning all his mess up.

Since we were living in a place with not much natural light, and we'd be moving pretty soon anyways, we decided not to buy a new fish.

Tomato hasn't been eating, at least, not worms, and I can't feed him the worms he likes best because they're bad for him... so we had to go get him some crickets. I dropped them in his cage, all 20 of them, and he ate 16. In one sitting.

While at the pet store, we wandered around a little bit. That's what you do at a pet store. Wander. Wonder. Whatever. We wandered from reptiles over to the adoption place, over to the cats, over to the fish when OMG BETA FISH JOE! BETA FISH!

We decided just to look.

After exactly 17 seconds of looking, we found these things called baby beta fish. They're like beta fish. But they're babies. And honestly, they're not that cute.

But this one was.

Little silver sliver with blue stripes. So we bought him. Him. The fish is a man. Well, technically right now it's a boy, since it's so little and stuff. But it's not a girl. You hear that Joe? This fish is a boy.

Joe likes the fish better than I. Every time he peeks in the bowl, he says "LARA! Baby is RAVENOUS! We have to feed her!!!"

And I say "You mean we have to feed him?"

We named the fish Baby. It's our first pet together, besides Tomato, but since I bought Tomato before we were married, Tomato is our child out of wedlock.

Baby is legitimate.

It was tricky picking a name for baby, because I'm not one to name a pet a typical name. I swear, every kid in my class has a fish named Ariel. And it's hard to pick human names for a pet because some day when we have for real kids, what if we want to name our kids after our fish? That won't go over well.

So for now, it's Baby. Some day it will grow up to be a fierce lion of the sea, but for now, it's just a baby.

And it's pretty cute.