The Fletcher Kids and their thoughts on "animals passing away"...

These are my three wonderful blessings. I just thought I would post some recent photos of them. I have some really cute ones of all three of them, but these are the most recently uploaded from my camera... they were taken in late July. Jimmy is my oldest (he's the blonde) and is almost 11, Ethan is with him and he is my middle and is 9 and Angel in the photo alone is my youngest and she is 7!

Anyways, today was an inservice day at school, so we were all off school today! Hooray... although it did mess up the kids sense of routine so quickly after school beginning, but it was still nice to have a day off while it is still warm outside!

When we returned from doing a few errands and getting our last shaved ice treat of summer, daddy was home already. The kids were checking out our fish (they like to just sit and watch them sometimes). We have a sucker fish whose name I can't remember because we all just call him "Sucker", one beautiful betta fish that we call "Sully" because he has the coloring of Sully on Monsters, Inc., five cute little tiny blue fish that we nicknamed "The Fletcher Five" and of course the kids seem to know which fish "resembles" them and is theirs, as well as two (well, now one...) orange guppy fish named Marlin and Nemo (for Finding Nemo movie). After a few minutes, Ethan noticed that one of them (Nemo) were not moving and seemed stuck under the rock (the fish had been acting a bit strange the past few days...)  :-(

The kids all jumped up to come and get me and dad to see if "Nemo" was okay. I got there first and could see that Nemo had already passed away. I told the kids that Nemo was swimming in Heaven with Jesus now and we needed to "bury" (flush) him. They were all very sad and Angel was already crying, as we held our quick little memorial service for him. They all said a quick memory of the little fish (including Devon (dad)) and then we prayed for him to be happy in heaven and told Angel that we'd see him someday again. Then we flushed Nemo. Angel was sobbing now and Jimmy had run upstairs to cry. Ethan seemed to be the only one holding it together and tried to reassure everyone that is was o.k. 

Still sad, we all got in the car to go to our local Boise Hawks baseball game for the night. When we arrived, we were told that the seats we could redeem for our vouchers were sold out! This just bummed the kids out even more, so we decided to make a detour to PetSmart. The kids picked out two more orange guppy fish to add to the tank and found one that was close enough to call "Nemo 2" and named the other one "Coral" after Nemo's mom on the movie... 

The fish did great in the tank when we introduced them and the three orange guppy fish are swirling all around each other. And, the most important part is that the kids are all happy, too! 

It's amazing that the small stuff in life can teach children so much about really living. 

My kids have a friend who is going through the loss of a grandpa (due to cancer) and they are sad because their friend hasn't been able to play much due to visiting him in another state for most of the summer.  We tried to relate some of the feelings from today and put them into bigger real life issues to help them be able to empathize with their friend in a small way when he returns. I pray that God will use these little things continuously in their lives to teach them and prepare them for when the bigger things happen.