Pets. Let me let you in on a little secret that you may not know about, if you have children, eventually you will have pets, whether you wanted to have pets or not. They kind of come as a package, and most likely you will not just have one type of pet; you usually go through a long menagerie of animals throughout your children's first years.
We started with goldfish. Harmless enough goldfish; cheap, easy to take care of, no walking, or cleaning litters, or worrying about leaving them alone. However, the sentence above is so not true. Well, ok you don't have to clean their litters or take them for walks, (and if you are we really need to talk) but the rest of that sentence is untrue.
First of all, they are not easy to clean, their tanks get dirty almost before your eyes, and of course cleaning the tank involves having another tank to put the fish in while you clean the dirty one (more money right there to own two tanks.) No matter what filter you buy, it either breaks, or doesn't clean the tank well enough to avoid you having to clean the tank, more than the young kid at the store (who probably knew as much about fish as he did about the Kennedy Assassination) told you, you would have to.
Of course fish are also boring. There is only so long you can stare at a bunch of things swimming in water, before you get bored and move on, and for children that time is about three- to four minutes. Of course the worst part about fish...they die...all the time. We had some fish that died before we got them home into our tank. Of course, most of those were the good old reliable church bazaar fish, but none-the-less, fish still die very quickly.
Half of our fish died when we changed their tank to clean them. If you were off by one percentage of a point of the right temperature they were used to, they croaked right then and there. Cleaning their tanks and transferring them was kind of like raising the Titanic. If you were to bring her up now, she would most likely fall apart as soon as she hit the air, because the atmosphere would be too much of a change for her, same thing with fish.
So, fish ended up being smelly, expensive by the time you buy sixty two fish, eight filters, filter pads, and of course the ever present ick medicine, they die easily, and the kids get bored with them about twelve seconds after they asked you for them in the first place. So we moved on to Hamsters. No water, so that was a plus, and we avoided all that icky goopy crap that sticks to the walls of the tank.
Hamsters however, presented their own problems. The first of which is that they can have babies faster than you and I can snap our fingers. By babies I mean, lots of babies, and usually more than the mother can handle. So what happens, they eat the babies that they cannot support, leaving little bits of heads and tails lying all around the cage. Makes you thankful your not a hamster doesnt it?
Made me wish I had the fish back. The kids do enjoy hamsters though alot more than the fish. They can let them out of their cage and hold them (where they will normally by the way proceed to pee on you), and they can roll around the house in their little plastic balls. Of course what the pet store didn't tell you, is that they can crash those balls into furniture enough times that it opens, and they get out. The next thing you know, you have small rodents running around your house, evading capture. So much for Hamsters.
From there we moved on to the old stand bys cats and dogs. Cats, in case you didn't know it are very well, how do I put this, how about egotistical and moody. Cats run their own show. If you want to pet them and their not in the mood, you wont be petting them, don't even try. If they are in the mood and you are in the middle of throwing a dinner party for fifty guests including your boss whom you are trying to impress, guess what, you're petting the cat!! Cats are also picky. I have one that if the litter isn't the right brand, the right consistency, evened out and poured under a full moon on a Thursday he wont go in the litter box, he will go right outside the litter box. As you can imagine he is one of my favorites.
Dogs, however, aren't as picky, and don't have the ego problem that cats do, they also allow your children to ride on them, as cats tend to scratch any child who comes within a mile radius of them. Dogs, go outside a definite plus, and enjoy playing with the kids. Of course they also bark at night for no reason at all, making you get out of bed thinking that they are foiling a robbery, just to find out, that they were barking at the wind. Dogs also think that they are people and should eat what you eat, when you eat it, and if you don't give it to them they stare at you while you eat, or if you have young kids they tend to sit by them, knowing how messy kids eat, something is bound to fall their way.
So in all, pets are probably worse than raising children. At least children you can reason with ...to a degree; kids understand what you are saying...when they are listening; and at least kids at some point learn to go to the bathroom on their own, and without making a mess, although I do know some men who still need help in that area, but that`s a story for another time.