Day 4: The girl's first pet died last night. :(

Day 4:

Our pet fish named Sunshine died yesterday evening. Aleigh knew who sunshine was but I thought she only paid him attention when we were feeding him, cleaning his tank or would mention his name. Turns out this was not the case and Aleigh had somewhat of an attachment to Sunshine.

I was not prepared to have to explain to Aleigh that a pet had died. I figured oh well Kea is 6, she still has years left so I never even thought about what to say to Aleigh.

Jake walks over to the tank and says uh oh I don't think Sunshine is doing so well. Aleigh and I immediately run over. Turns out he was already gone. Aleigh gets a very confused look on her face. Jake then takes Sunshine out and goes to flush him down the toilet. I was explaining to Aleigh what happened. She hears the toilet flush and gives a very worried sounding cry and runs to the toilet, lifts the lid and looks in with a scared look on her face.

I then think OK maybe she will forget about it and will be fine. This morning in 3 hours she went up to the fish tank pointing and basically asking where sunshine was without actually talking. Each time I had to explain to her that Sunshine isn't there anymore, he was sick and had to go to fish heaven and get healed. Today she looked for Sunshine 4 times. I never knew she gave that much attention to the little angel fish.

I think I will now look into breaking the bad news to a kid and try to figure out the best way to do that. I have no idea. Fish Heaven just came out of my mouth and I stuck with it.

In other news a sweet neighbor dropped off the Sunday paper on our doorstep this morning. It makes me want to pay it forward to someone else. There are still a lot of thoughtful people out there. Sometimes watching the news you start thinking this world is full of terrible people. This simple nice gesture brings me back to the true reality.

I have such wonderful neighbors, I really am blessed. Once I had a huge box of Diapers given to me by a neighbor. Another time I had 2 handmade bags and a baby blanket given to me. Another time some coupons. The last time a lady dropped off a bag full of snacks for Aleigh, now the newspaper.

Tomorrow I am going to help an older neighbor clean up his house. He offered to pay me some money to clean it as he just doesn't have the time or energy to and he thinks he is having some family come visit him soon.