It seemed so simple.

The middle little miss loves animals.  All animals.  So among the duct tape and pens she requested on her Christmas list, she asked for a fish.  And I, in my naivete, thought "what a nice, low-maintenance gift that would be!"  So we ordered this aquarium through Amazon.  It's three gallons and the light changes color.  We win again.  Until.....

 less than a month later we have murdered five fish: two guppies and 3 neon tetras.  The Mister has made 3 trips to the pet store this week learning what he can about what happened.  Apparently we created something called, "New Tank Syndrome."  Yes, that's a real thing.  It's when you don't know what you're doing, and you put in too many fish with too much food too fast in a tank that doesn't have enough bacteria built up to break it all down. It makes all the chemicals in the tank go funky.  And funky means uninhabitable.

So we were told to take it more slowly and buy some bacteria booster.  The Mister got it all cleaned out how he was told and even had the pet store test the water to make sure everything was ok. Last night he and the little miss picked two Whitefin fish (or something like that) and an African Dwarf Frog that were sure to be hardy.

When I woke up this morning, the frog seemed great, but the fish didn't look so good.  One was still upright, but lying on the floor of the tank.  The other one was on it's side on the bottom of the tank.  She cried when she found out about the first dead fish.  What's going to happen if she learns her new ones died in less than 12 hours?!?  The Mister said something about how they can go dormant, so we're hoping that something has changed by the time he gets home (with the girls) tonight.  This might seem optimistic, but the guppies appeared to be dead at one point and then bounced back. (And then of course, died again.)  Fingers crossed we get a miracle without the aforementioned parentheticals.