For parents, there are a lot of upsides to buying a goldfish for a child: it’s inexpensive, it doesn’t have to be walked or picked up after, and it doesn’t wake up everyone in the house whenever someone walks by outside. But there are some downsides, too.

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Everett Hamlin found that out the hard way. The 4-year-old Georgia boy loved his pet goldfish, Nemo, so much that he decided to bring it to bed to snuggle. By the time the Everett’s parents found him sound asleep, cradling his beloved pet, poor Nemo was beyond saving.

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“I was shocked,” Tori Hamlin wrote on Facebook. “When he said he just wanted to pet it, I was thinking,;Oh my God, that’s so sad.’ He loved that goldfish. He had no understanding of what he was doing. We explained it to him and he got upset and said, ‘I didn’t want to kill my fish.'”

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Fortunately, kids are resilient — and helping little Everett get over the tragedy was as easy as taking him to the pet store the following day to buy a new gold fish.