School Days and THE POND

The kids are back in school!  Zack is in 9th grade, which means high school here.  I can't believe he's in high school.  This is crazy.  I remember high school.  How do I have a kid old enough to be in high school?  So far he's killing it.  Or at least surviving.  I feel like we're still in the early days where it's new enough that we don't really have any complaints yet.  And so far not much homework.  So things are good.  On his first day he said it was weird to go to seminary and pray during school.  Gotta love seminary.  And he said his favorite class was science because his teacher said he likes to blow things up.  So you know, we're learning a lot.  Kate is in 7th grade and we're fully just trying to make it through middle school relatively unscathed.  Middle school is the worst.  Kate is rocking middle school as much as anyone can rock middle school.  We're grateful she has a lot of classes with one of her good friends.  And we're also grateful she's taking cooking and sewing so she can continue to do those things for us.  Sage is still in elementary school, bless her heart.  She's in 4th grade, spanish dual immersion.  Which means this is her fourth year being with these same 45 kids.  They know each other well.  This year both of her teachers are boys, which is a different experience for us.  Her spanish teacher moved here like a month ago from Spain.  He talks fast.  I really struggled to understand him at back to school night, so I was a little worried about Sage.  But she was proud to tell me after her first day that she understood everything he said.  I love how good she's getting at spanish.  When Sage got home from her first day of school she sat on my lap and gave me a big hug.  She said, "I missed you Mom."  I said, "I missed you too."  Then she said, "No you didn't.  You needed a break!"  Out of the mouth of babes....  Anyway, that's a really long paragraph that my english teacher would have loved.

Zack had another mountain bike race yesterday at Snowbasin.  This was a tough race for Zack.  Killer climb and tough downhill.  Not his best race.  But I'm proud of him for doing something that can be so hard.  Mountain bike racing is not for the faint of heart, that's for sure.  I manage to stay pretty calm and collected.  Impressive, I think.

Now for the pond.  Oh, the pond.  We've lived here for more than three years now, and for more than three years the pond was a hole.  Right off our deck.  Right next to our nice patio.  Jake really loved to sit next to it and relax.  Not at all.  It made him crazy.  But I think we both knew what a big project it would be, so neither of us was super excited to get going on it.  But we finally started.  And mostly finished.  Hallelujah.  First we got the liner in.  No small feet for a pond this big.  Good thing we're strong.  Once the liner was in it was just a marathon of getting rocks covering it all.  This took a long time.  Like a couple whole days of just moving rock.  I think I touched every rock in that pond at least once, if not twice.  Jake has a job along the Provo River that they just excavated and dug up tons of river rock.  Perfect for a pond.  So we would go to his job, throw rocks in the dump trailer for like an hour, and then unload them at the house.  Thank heavens the dump trailer could just dump them.  But we couldn't dump them in the pond for fear of getting a hole in the liner.  So we had to get them from the side of the pond to the actual pond.  This was so much fun.  We threw rocks in a line.  We loaded buckets.  We loaded our arms.  It was the most fun project ever.  But finally, last week, we got the pond covered, the pump in, and the waterfall ready to go.  I would say it was a miracle, but it wasn't.  It was a lot of hard work.  A lot.  The pond finally had water in it, lights on, waterfall running.  It was amazing.  We sat outside in the dark, with the fire on, and just enjoyed our hard work.  Sage was quick to swim the next day.  All of the kids got in, but it was way too cold for everyone but Sage.  She was freezing, but determined to swim in and enjoy her "natural pool."  Please bless that we never, ever, ever, get a leak.  Please.

First day of school!

Killer uphill.  Poor kids.

And so it begins.

Thank heavens for the dump trailer

The pond.

She's not cold at all.