bad, bad shrimpie mom

Two years ago for Christmas, one of my daughters and I each got an ecosphere. If you've never seen one of these, they're really cool. It's a miniature self-sustaining world in a clear, closed globe. You don't open it. You don't feed them. It's a complete ecosystem with gravel, plant life, algae, and little teensy tinsy shrimp. All you have to do is provide a light source, natural or artificial. The shrimp thrive in their little world without any assistance. They can live for a couple years or maybe even longer, and if you're super lucky, they might even make more little shrimpies in their little world.

When we got these cool ecospheres, my daughter's had three shrimp in it and mine had five. Now she will argue this point until the day she dies. She says I only had three. I think she was just plain so jealous that she forgot how to count for a second. We've had this argument many times. But there really were five in mine. I had a hard time counting the little critters cuz they'd move around, but occasionally they would all be still and visible long enough to count them. Who knows? Maybe there were even more!

At one point, I think I put my little shrimps in a bad spot, and suddenly there were only three. And then one day, there were none. Sounds something like a bad scene from an Agatha Christie mystery, but it's not. I felt really bad about it. I stared at it and willed a shrimp to come back to life. I couldn't bring myself to throw it away. Then one day, I was walking by it and low and behold, there was a little baby shrimp flitting merrily around in there. What!? My dying shrimp apparently had left me a gift! Yay! But my joy was to be short lived. It didn't live very long, and I have not had the courage to tell my daughter that it died. I am taking the chicken way out and letting her read it through my blog. My shame is endless.

I'm a bad, bad shrimpie mom, but there really were five shrimpies in the beginning.