The Aquarium

I can't figure out exactly why we have an aquarium. Not just a little aquarium, but a big 55 gallon aquarium with mollies and guppies and a few bottom feeders and a beta and some snails and actual growing plants. Aquariums are always interesting for about the first two days, then they become part of the background and you just don't notice them. They're like really high maintenance art. Art that you have to feed daily and change filters and water and scrub every couple of weeks. Art that might break or leak and flood your living room. Art that sucks electricity to keep warm when the house is cold. Art that occasionally dies and floats to the surface.

Fish are hard to photograph.

We got this aquarium as a family Christmas present last year. We had a small aquarium for a while when we had babies and it just didn't work out. If I didn't pay attention to the filter (and I didn't) then a design flaw would end up spilling gallons of water on the floor. That was bad. Then about two years ago my oldest daughter got really interested in fish and asked for an aquarium for her birthday. I'll write more about her fish later, but it's enough to say that once she had an aquarium, everyone wanted an aquarium. I think that might be why we ended up with the big aquarium in the living room. It seemed easier than trying to maintain four aquariums throughout the house. And don't ever let your kids fool you, if they want an aquarium, you'll end up being the maintenance man for it. Even if you have very responsible kids that can remember to take care of their pets, an aquarium has some heavy lifting that's going to require dad. Water is heavy, and moving water in any way that doesn't end up with a LOT of spills takes more muscle control than most kids seem to have. My kids anyway. So in order to prevent small scale floods the heavy work of cleaning and moving water is always done by me.
I do like the fish though. They're pretty. The mollies recently surprised us by producing a school of babies. This caught us off guard as we didn't know that we had a female mixed in. It's cool to one day notice the almost invisible fry swimming in the tank and watch them grow without getting eaten by their tank mates. Luckily we had enough room in the tank to absorb the new fish without overcrowding. If they manage to do it again they'll just be making snacks for the goldfish.