One Minute Passed

Wednesday the girls cleaned the turtle aquarium. Tyler, wanting very much to create a pleasant living space for the creature, sprayed the rocks with FreshCare, presumably in the hope that Minute would enjoy the “fresh clean feeling”… I wasn’t present, so I can only trust Carina when she assures me that Tyler washed the rocks afterward. How well she may have washed these rocks is another question.

On the FreshCare label, it clearly states:

Product is not intended to be used directly on pets.

I'm going to assume this also means that the product is not to be used on turtle's rocks. We can only assume that the chemical seeped from the rocks into the water, which Minute then drank, and promptly got sick. She bore through Thursday like a tough little turtle, but Friday morning she was in bad shape. She was struggling to climb up her (chemical laced) rocks, and was generally moving about as though she were drunk. When I got home, she was motionless.

We lamely examined her a few times, and left her to warm up under her heat lamp, hoping she was just catatonic and not, in fact, dead. When we awoke Saturday morning, she hadn’t moved an inch from where we had set her the night before. I cautiously explained the reality to the twins. Both were morose, but Tyler quickly asked “So can we just get another turtle?”

We had a quiet burial ceremony in the backyard, where we all said a few kind words about our expired little amphibian. Then, later in the afternoon Tyler and I set forth to purchase a new turtle. We did so, and are now struggling with names. The current favorites are “Dinky” and “Speedy”. The latter is appropriate, as he’s an energetic little fellow, but the former isn’t quite appropriate because he’s a good spot larger than Minute was.

The lesson to be learned from all of this, of course, is that household chemicals do not belong anywhere in the turtle maintenance cycle…