Luke gets a pet

This is the story of Luke's first "real" pet. I say real because he has been telling people for months that he has pets. He just picks one of his stuffed animals and that's his pet. This pet is a little different because it is "real".

Our neighbors have a beautiful fish pond in their backyard that we have admired it for a long time. They have been out of town for most of the month and we have been feeding their fish. Luke was very interested and helped me feed them every time (he did fall in once while we were feeding them). I told him that if he helped me remember to feed the fish we could think about getting our own fish. Well, Luke lived up to his end of the deal and worried constantly about whether the fish had enough to eat. He put a lot of thought into their well being; when it rained he asked me if getting more water would make the fish happy (do fish have emotions?). So, when our neighbors came home from their trip we asked them if we could take one of their fish to live at our house. They agreed and so we rushed over to pick out a bowl and food and then went over to pick out the newest member of our family.

The rest of the story is illustrated.

Here Luke is picking his fish out. He had been thinking of a name for weeks and our friend Whitney suggested Raymond-- it stuck. So here Luke is deciding which fish looks like a Raymond.

Raymond was spotted, caught in a net and then transferred to...

the plastic bag we brought over.

Luke was so happy he could hardly contain himself.

But, he did pause to listen to instructions from Randy, our kind neighbor, about how to care for our addition.

Luke tried to get Noah interested in the fish but Noah just wanted to sample a blade of the jungle we have growing in our backyard (we can't mow the back until things dry out a little more).

We then brought him home and sat his bag in the water until it was all the same temperature.

Then we transferred him into his new home. He looked like he was a lot smaller when he was swimming around in the pond. He looked a little cramped in this first bowl. We had a new one but felt he had gone through enough trauma for the day.
So we gave him dinner,

Luke pointed at him,
Noah reached for him,

Luke stared at him some more,

and then he insisted that he be moved into his room for the night (so he wouldn't be lonely, of course).


This morning we moved him into a slightly bigger bowl and he seems to have a little more swimming space.

Luke is still thrilled about him and talks to him all the time, sings to him, blows him kisses and

hugged him goodnight before heading off to bed.