Fishy food for thought

I have just performed a potentially life saving procedure on my son's Goldfish. If you follow me on Facebook you will have seen my updates live. You will have also known I was very happy to have had success. 

Ill give you a run down of events first, Then I have something with a little more thought for you.

I noticed that Holly wasn't her usual self and upon closer inspection I could see a pebble lodged in her mouth. I refer to Holly as her, we have no idea of the fishes sex we just got charlie to name them. He wanted Ben and Holly for those in the UK I'm sure this will have just made you smile :-). For everyone else, follow the link its one of his favorite shows.

So I'm watching the fish, for about an hour, and this pebble is going nowhere. The poor fish is getting distressed and I have no idea what to do all I can think is Charlie will be devastated. 

I think to myself action required, a Google search later I prepare my tools. I modified the end of a wooden chop stick and got an old baking tray. To modify I used a craft knife to make the end thin and smooth.

Reading some answers from the web I get some tissue wet and prepared to get Holly out of the tank. The first time she was out I was all fingers and couldn't get much of a hold, however after a few attempts I got more confident. The sixth time of trying I got a good grip of the pebble and scraped it out. We now have two happy fish in the tank again.

When I put the fish back in to the tank it made me realise that Charlie would wake up and be unaware that anything had happened. That made me think further, about all the things we do for our kids which they will never know about. Yet if we didn't do them then we be exposing our kids to things we really do not want them to be understanding yet. 

I asked myself how far I would go to protecting Charlie on this occasion, would I have been willing to buy another fish with the same colours ? I feel, although I'd have liked to have brought a replacement fish, it would have been going to far. I feel a warming explanation of what had happened to Holly and that she had gone to heaven would have been the best thing to do if she had died.

I think buying another fish to replace a dead one is a small thing to do, a nice thing and saves the tears. However doing this type of thing cumulatively over the course of a childhood could be going to far and falsely protecting them. This I feel would create a little bubble where nothing goes wrong and as we all know life throws nasty thing at all of us.