My kindergarten class had monarch butterflies. When it was migration season and they were fully grown, they released them into the wild.

My third grade class had a betta fish. Everyone wanted to call him Charlie but me... I voted for the name Expo after the marker brand. So I now call him Charlie Expo. He died, though.

Then I kept bugging my parents about getting a dog, but they thought it would be too much work, so we got fish instead. The first ones were a dalmatian molly, a black molly and two male guppies (We never found out what gender any of the mollies were. I'll have to take a look at their fins in the photos we took of them someday...) We didn't do any research for some reason, so we didn't know we were mixing freshwater fish with brackish-water fish. So the guppies died (the black molly kept nipping one of the guppies' tails and I'm pretty sure the other guppy died of fright from being so scared of the molly) and we got two more black mollies. Then they died too, and we got a silver molly and a fantail goldfish... and they died too. I suspect it was because, as far as I can remember, I used to ask "can I give them a little extra food, just one piece?" and they would let me, so we probably overfed them by accident. My dad flushed them down he and my mom's toilet without my permission. I'm still offended by that, because there are a number of health risks for both the person and the fish involved when you flush a fish down the toilet, not to mention I was only in what, third grade? so I was really upset about it.


On vacation last year, I caught a grasshopper. She (at least, I'm pretty sure it was a she) was missing a leg and an antennae, so I decided to keep her. I named her Hopper. Apparently, the place we were staying in had a mouse. I think it was a deer mouse, because it ate half of the gourmet bone-shaped dog treats we were going to give our dog (we started planning on getting a dog last June). The mouse chewed a hole in her habitat (I used the butterfly habitat from kindergarten to house her... I think it was the same one the butterflies used to live in) and according to my dad my mom was out on the patio taking pictures, so Hopper got out. I couldn't find her on the patio the next morning, but I hope she didn't try to jump to the ground...


Then I caught another grasshopper. I named this one Rainforest Clover. She was bigger than Hopper, since she was an older nymph. I was actually closer to Rainforest than Hopper. I managed to teach her some tricks (well, it seemed like it anyway) such as jumping over my arm. I even saw her do a backflip once! Sometimes I took her to the clover field across the street so she could eat. She almost ate an entire clover once! Plus she was big enough that I could spot her and pick her up if she tried to run (or would it be jump?) off. But it only lasted half a week. I was going to take her home with me to see if grasshoppers could crossbreed (although now that I think about it, they might just fight instead so it was probably a bad idea anyway). But then on the day we were going home, I went to check on her (she lived in the same butterfly habitat) and she was dead. At first I thought she laid eggs in the bulldog head I sculpted out of clay dirt that I put in her habitat, since grasshoppers die when they lay eggs, but she was still a nymph, so I doubt it. Maybe she was sick or something. I buried her in grass and clovers, in her favorite clover field.


Later that month we adopted our beagle dog, Marley. She's tricolor. At least my parents did a little bit of research this time, but now they think they're dog behaviorists just because they read two books on beagles. They never believe me when I tell them a valid, proven fact about dog behavior, when I've been researching canines since 2011. Not that I'm an expert either (although I like to pretend I am), but I'm still pretty sure I know more than they do.