Welcome Two Ariels and Six King Tritons

I've been waiting to write this post until I was sure they would survive but now that our second batch of goldfish has made it through more than a month of duplex living I would like to announce the arrival of our newest pets.

I had this idea to give Josie and Lucy two goldfish for Christmas this year. I had this vision of them getting up on Christmas morning to a aquarium with their new fish in it. Unfortunately this turned out to be almost impossible logistically since we were staying in a rental house on the beach for Christmas. I didn't want to move the whole aquarium back and forth and stress out the fish. So instead we decided to give the girls the fish as a present for surviving the whole hospital ordeal. Thus in the second week of January we went to the pet store with Grandma Jo and picked out two goldfish, one gold and one black, from the feeder fish tank. Lucy was pretty psyched as was Josie and Lucy named the fish Ariel and King Triton (little mermaid anyone?).

Unfortunately the first King Triton and Ariel did not do well. I'm not sure what happened (out dated water conditioner, something weird in the aquarium gravel left over from my previous goldfish five years ago, some ick from the feeder fish tank which did have a few dead fish floating around in it...). Both of the fish perished in less than 24 hours. I was pretty bummed out and felt guilty but Lucy took it pretty well in stride. She did become convinced that all future pet fish would die in short order...

Anyway we gave it a second try. I stayed up late triple washing and then boiling all the gravel and then quadruple rinsing everything. Then the next day we all went to another pet store and picked out another three feeder goldfish and six neon tetras. Lucy kept asking if the fish were going to die for the first week and a half but now she sees that they have staying power. One of the neon tetras did kick the bucket during the first week but everyone else is doing great. We've been through one partial water change and about 1.5 months of living in the Brigham-Allen household. The girls are way into them and like to stand on stools and watch them swim around. Just a week ago Kathmandu finally discovered the fish and now she too enjoys watching them swim around. She likes to sit on the edge of the couch and watch them.

Of course Lucy stuck with the King Triton and Ariel names so the two gold colored fish are both Ariel and the one grey goldfish and the five remaining neon tetras are all King Tritons. Now that we have the aquarium environment under control, I think the next phase might be to get some snails like Tyler has.