Josh has 4 passions that pretty much everything we do focuses around…
First and foremost are Crocodiles – since he was tiny he’s love them, our house is full of them!
Second is surfing – it’s core to his existance and has enabled us to keep him off medication!
Third are modern combat aircraft – helicopters and jets in particular and is fueled by an insatiable desire to build models; and finally
His salt water fish tanks – we have 3, one in the living room, and 2 in his bedroom, through the fish tanks we’ve learnt about life, death, patience and the delicate balance of the natural world.
Most days I wonder given the amazing joy the tanks bring and the depths of the lows that the losses bring, whether the tanks are the most negative positive that we have for Josh or the most positive negative… confused? me too!
So here’s a story that’s been a typical week for nearly 2 years now…
We’ve become the local aquarium shop’s most frequent and loyal customers, its only taken 2 years and Josh is now somewhat comfortable to interact with Steve the shop owner… He’ll jump out of the car when we get there and run in without us…
Our week has to be shaped up around visiting Steve’s to check out what sort of new fish he has, it starts Monday morning, “when can we go to Steve’s this week?”, “can we go on Saturday?”, “are you sure we can go on Saturday?” and so it goes throughout the week… It’s kinda cool actually, there are way worse things we could do than visit the fish shop and check out the new arrivals each week…
Of course in between visits to Steve’s, Josh trawls the internet and reads his fish books (fish and airplane books are the only books he’ll read) looking for cool fish and is amply armed with questions for Steve at the fish shop on our next visit!
This week, Steve had a small purple fish in his tank that Josh fell instantly in love with… it was small and had been picked on by other fish and Steve offered for Josh to be able to take it home…
I was at work so found out in an over excited phone call (I get a heap of those about the fish tanks) that we had a new addition to the tank today. Josh was so excited to have a new fish in his tank.
It was going into the third tank… the smallest and least established… it wasn’t long before some of the high was coming off the new addition and the questions were turning to, “will he be OK in there Dad?”, “is the water OK Dad?”, “can you check on him Dad?” and this just goes on and on…
Unfortunately, “lucky” as he had been named because he survived being picked on by other fish and got to come to our house, didn’t survive the night, and was floating behind the filter when we checked the tanks this morning…
You could see Josh’s little face turn down a little, he’s come to accept that fish don’t always survive, but I don’t think that makes it any easier for him, he won’t cry, he deals with it in his own way… a little later he came up to us and simply said “I’m a bit sad about lucky”… and walked off and got on with his day…
About an hour later we were back at Steve’s for our weekly visit to the fish shop, and Josh racing from one tank to another checking out all the new additions and trying to convince us that we should get a bigger 6ft tank so that he could get “blind shark”… “not today mate, it’s hard enough to look after little tanks! and anyway a shark would eat all your other fish!”
“oh yeah”, he replies and is back to checking out what the next addition will be… It looks like the smallest tank is going to be turned back to freshwater and we’re getting a bright blue crayfish…
And so our adventures with fish tanks continue, for a little boy with Asperger’s, they have been such a positive thing, he’s learnt so very much, yet with the ups come the downs and the stress and anquish they cause worry us too, but there is no way we’re getting rid of them… maybe, just maybe there is a future for him in the aquarium industry?
Stay tuned for more of the amazing adventures we have with our fish tanks!
