Fish Food.

I like fish. I don't like to eat fish (although I do take fish oil capsules every day, cause Crystal told me to), but I do like to go out and sit on a boat and act like I'm fishing, when really all I'm doing is looking at turtles and lily pads and watching my skin burn to a crisp.

I have a fish tank, because I like fish. It's a small ten gallon tank with nothing fancy in it - a couple little stripy fish, a gigantic pleco (which is the fish-fancier word for "fish with sucky mouth,") and a huge goldfish who always tries to eat the little stripy guys. I also have two little aquatic frogs in there, and the pleco is always trying to eat them. I keep hoping the frogs will copulate and make little froggy babies, but I think I actually have homosexual frogs. It's cool though, so long as they don't go getting married (because a gay frog marriage would totally destroy the sanctity of my own heterosexual human marriage.)

You might ask yourself what these fish eat, and I would totally laugh at you if you did, because that would mean you are an idiot. They eat fish food. The frogs eat fish food too, but they eat the kind that looks like little pellets and sinks to the bottom for their dining pleasure. Fish food is really gross. Its basically all the guts and scales and bones and nasty parts of fish, and then the people at the fish food factory grind it up and mix it with water and spread it out, and it dries into a nasty hard fish food sheet, and then they bust it all up and put it in fish food jars. I know, because I saw it on Dirty Jobs once.

Four is enthralled by the fish food. She doesn't feed the fish, because the tank is up high on the entertainment center, but even if it wasn't, she still wouldn't feed them. She has no desire to. She just likes to look at the fish food, and smell it, which frankly is just sick, so I try to discourage it.

The other day she asked to please see the fish food. She had the container in her hands, and she held it out to me. "Open?" she asked.

"No," I said. "We're not looking at fish food right now."

"OOOOPPPPEEEENNNNNNN!!!!" she yelled.

"I said no," I replied, resisting the urge to holler back at her. "We're not looking at fish food now. Mommy's hands are busy."

She looked me in the eye. "OOOOPPPPPEEENNNNNN!!! NOW!!!"
And as she screamed, she pulled at the cap.

Suddenly, the cap popped off, and fish food went flying into the air, fluttering to earth like fish cremain confetti.

Fou's mouth fell open. She checked my reaction, then dropped the empty container and high-tailed it out of the room.




I cleaned it up with the vacuum cleaner hose, and I didn't discipline Four, because I am a crappy parent.

Later I told my friend Amber about the incident, and she laughed, and then said she had some fish food at her house, but no fish. I told her to mix the fish food with Eazy Cheez and make it into little balls, and throw the balls in the river, and when a catfish comes up for it, noodle it out of the water. I might have to try that myself.