We lost a fish in our fish tank.

No really, we did. I’m assuming that it died suddenly and the other fish ate it because I think I have heard of this carnivorous fish behavior—or maybe they just eat their babies? I don’t know. But whatever happened, Katy Fish Perry has gone MIA. Trust me, she’s not hiding in the plants—the more-than-hour-long Saving Private Ryan like mission to find her was all the proof I needed that she was indeed, gone like the wind. Only, it meant, really, that now we were never going to hear the end of this, and ended up having a memorial service of sorts late, late, late last night, that included leftover movie popcorn and chocolate chip cookie pie, as any good Jewish service should. Katy Fish Perry, MIA, RIP. We had such a rocky start with this upsold fish tank of ours, having funerals on the daily. And then the universe seemed to balance itself out and everything was wonderful in fishland until this possible Donner Party situation arose, and now I don’t think Isabella will ever sleep again.

Child uses every possibly hook that she can to not sleep—disappearing fish is probably the most interesting I have heard so far, and one that no parenting book has an answer for.

The leftover movie popcorn was from Frozen. In a very last-minute this-day-is-cold-and-icky moment, we opted to stay inside and have a popcorn lunch. We were obviously not the only people with this genius idea, as we were forced to sit in the very last seats of the very second row, in the obstructed view seats. Luckily, my kids seem to have necks with owl-like movements and fears of bears in what proved to be an entirely bear-free movie, so we stayed and I was thankful for an end seat and a bendy body—I contorted myself into a mostly comfortable position. It’s probably good that I was on the outskirts of movie society because I basically cried and cry-laughed through the entire movie. Maybe I was extra emotional, but I cried my fool head off throughout this “Do You Want To Build a Snowman?” song but it wasn’t really supposed to be all that sad, but I just kept thinking about my girls—sisters—and then thinking about my own sister and I just kind of lost it right there in the theater.

I did THE UP CRY and hid behind my popcorn, and my knees.

Can we talk for a minute about arcades?

You see, we had tried to time our movie with that of the Catching Fire crew except their movie was an extra-long time commitment and we had some time to kill, and so I indulged my kids and bought them each $5 worth of tokens to blow use in the arcade. But here’s the thing—all of the actual arcade-like games have been replaced by these PULL A LEVER AND HOPE FOR TICKETS games. Granted, there were two skee-ball games and one pinball—I think it was Metallica?!!—for the kids to play with, but everything else was just a take my tokens ploy.

The kids get all wide-eyed and excited—”This game says I can win 100 tickets!” but then you go over to the ticket redemption machine where you can trade in 100 tickets for exactly a thumb-sized yo-yo that doesn’t work or a bouncy ball that doesn’t actually bounce. Hooray! What a prize!

When do kids learn that it’s a lot more fun to actually PLAY the games than it is to care about getting the most amount of tickets? Although I guess to be fair to them, I wouldn’t really want to play Metallica pinball either. I wish they’d bring back real games—racing games, Pac-Man, or even Duck Hunt would be better than this—and get rid of spin this, turn this, smash this, grab this games.

Maybe next time I just need to tell Isabella how many replacement Katy Fish Perrys we can buy for $5…