Author: Rebecca

Kyle and I have been talking for awhile about hauling in some dirt to mix in with the nasty clay that we have here in Eagle Mountain. We can hardly get anything to grow out in the yard, because most plants don’t thrive in clay. It’s hard for the roots to get water, because the water puddles on the surface, and it’s hard for the roots to get oxygen because the clay is so packed, and so the roots will usually mold and get nasty. Not to mention that it’s not easy for the roots to spread out and grow in such compact soil. And our backyard insn’t level so when it rains a lot we end up with the entire back HALF of our backyard being a lake, so we also wanted more dirt so we can hopefully take care of that.

Well a month or two ago Kyle saw a truck in Lehi just sitting on the side of the road with a sign advertising topsoil and there was a phone number listed. He called to get some prices, and we have talked about it and decided we are going to haul in some dirt this year. So, finally this past week Kyle made the call and ordered our dirt, and decided that we should have the truckload of manure delivered first and it’s HERE!!!

They delivered it yesterday while I was out with the family making the runs to the doctors. I am SO excited! I can’t wait to get it spread out in the backyard (and out of the driveway), but alas, it decided to rain today. Don’t get me wrong I LOVE the rain, it makes the most beautiful sound. But I REALLY wanted to get that pile moving from the driveway to the backyard. Oh well, that will be our project for throughout the week if it’s not raining.

When the kids opened their blinds this morning and saw this huge pile in the driveway they wanted to know how it got there, and we told them it’s actually poop not dirt (we had to explain what manure is).

So Tyra asked Kyle: Daddy, Why were you riding a horse?

Kyle: I wasn’t riding a horse….

Tyra: Then how did the horse poop in our driveway???

So we explained that a truck brought the dirt, it was so funny though (like one horse could do all that overnight….). 😉

Well we’ve had some fish in our tank since Easter weekend, but every one of our original fish has died. And we keep making trips to the pet store to exchange them, and those fish have all died. They have just been dying left and right. The only things from our original fish purchase that have survived this whole time, are the frogs. So Kyle and I were starting to think that the frogs were trying to eat the other fish or something and that they were killing everyone else off……

Yesterday I was looking in the tank to see if I could find any of the living fish and I spotted a couple of the red ones, and they had white spots all over them (and I noticed that one of the white fish was dead). So I told Kyle about it and he did a google search and sent me a link to some fish disease that I seriously thought that he already knew what the fish had. (He laughed when I asked him how he knew that that article explained what was going on in our tank.) By the time we cam back home from the bug program last night, five fish had died throughout yesterday. So we decided it was still early enough to go to petsmart and return them, and we decided to take the two remaining living fish with (in a separate container of course). We were able to return the dead fish, and the guy in the fish department took one look at the two remaining living fish and said “you’ve got ‘ich'”. We were so surprised that this guy could tell just by looking at these fish what the problem was, when it has taken us weeks to figure it out!

I just LOVE it when this guy is working when we go to petsmart to get fish. He actually KNOWS what he’s talking about and he’s the FIRST petsmart employee in the fish department that I have EVER had that knows about the fish (and we’ve had a fish tank for years now). He was even able to tell us which fish were male and which are female! He could tell us anything we asked him all because he has had personal experience with fish. HE’S AWESOME! He even let us return the two living fish for a full refund as well (since they were pretty much done for anyways with all those parasites under their skin).

SO we bought some ‘medication’ for our fish tank and decided to not get any new fish at the current time because our fish tank is under quaranteen for the next few weeks. Bummer I know, it looks so empty with no fish in it, and I had to pull our live plants out and treat them separately (the guy at petsmart said that they would just absorb the medication which would make the tank take longer to get over the parasite infestation). So the tank is really empty aside from our rocks and the frogs (this parasite doesn’t affect these frogs so they are safe, thank goodness). Sigh, someday we’ll have fish again.