Super Special Surprise

The sorry state of our post-vacation pantry motivated us to take a trip to Carrefour, the biggest supermarket around, to stock up. We can wheel our little cart to the neighborhood markets day in and day out for most of what we need, but every now and then a big shop is in order, and today was the day.

The first time Alec and I went there, weeks ago, leaving the kids with Myron and Raquel, we spied a pet store across the way from Carrefour in the same mall, and decided to bring home a couple of fish for the kids. I had seen a fishbowl type thing at the apartment that I thought would do nicely for their home, and it seemed like an inexpensive way to score a lot of points with the wee ones. We also figured it would help ease the transition and also fill a tiny bit of the enormous hole left in all of our hearts by Hoover’s passing in March. We were all set to do it when we realized that we would be going on this long vacation and the fish would be unlikely to make it. So we put it off until our return and kept our plan a secret from the kids.

This morning at breakfast, we told them that we had a “super special surprise” in store after the grocery shopping. They began to badger us and to guess, of course: “Ice cream?” “A swimming pool?” “Our boxes are coming?” Milo, little minx, actually asked, “Is it a new pet?” I dodged the question by responding: “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea since we’re just here for a year and pets are hard to travel with.” “It might die by he time we leave,” Milo suggested sort of hopefully.

Many hours and two carts loaded with groceries later, we steered them into the pet shop and announced that the super special surprise was that they could each pick out a fish. They rewarded us appropriately with shouts of “Hooray!” and much clapping and jumping up and down. I squatted down with them to help them choose their fish while Alec talked to the pet store lady to figure out what we would need—a little food, we figured, and something with which to clean the bowl. Maybe a net for when we changed the water.

I was partly right. After his conversation, Alec called me over to say that, first, he needed to back into Carrefour to buy distilled water… for the fish. Also, the pet store lady had told him that, with a bowl the size of ours and with no filter, we’d have to change the water every day or every other day max. Mind you, these are garden variety gold fish---the kind you get for a buck at your school carnival. I never remember changing the water more than every couple of weeks when I had them as a kid, and we certainly didn’t have a ginormicous tank for them. Then again, all of my goldfish died pretty quickly back then. Still, there was no way I was about to change their water every other day. “Don’t you think she’s being a bit conservative?” I asked Alec. “I actually think she really cares about these fish,” he said.

The kids had already chosen their fish (see photo below—the yellow one is C.C.’s and the speckled one is Milo’s) and were discussing names, so it was too late to turn back. For a moment, I actually walked over to the gerbil cage and silently considered whether I could handle living with a rodent. The answer is no. So we bought the tank, the gravel, the water---the filter is actually arriving tomorrow, so someone has to drive all the way back to the Carrefour place to pick it up.

After we set up the tank, Milo pulled a chair up in front of it and spent an hour just watching the fish, while C.C. ran to her art table and used her new colored pencils to draw their portraits. And I sat back and almost forgot that we had just spent well north of 100 euros for a surprise we thought would cost us 10 euros at most.