This past weekend was Take 2 of the Great Pond Enhancement of 2020. If you recall, the first time I ripped out the old liner, made the pond bigger, and put in a new liner, it ended in 2020-style disaster. Fish died, the liner had holes in it ... everything was terrible. I really wanted to wait a very long time to touch the whole thing again, but it was losing enough water every day to turn the back yard into a swamp in the midst of a drought. That seemed dumb.
So. New liner. And a redo on the whole damn project.
The most important thing that I learned is that doing that project a second time within a few weeks is INFINITELY easier than doing it the first time. There wasn't 10 years of settling and muck-collection and such, which seriously made it a full day less effort. It also helped that there were no really large fish, as awful as that sounds. They definitely made things more difficult.
There were, however, lots and lots and lots of baby fish to deal with. Hundreds of them, even. I know that there was an insane quantity of them because when Mila became aware that the project would be happening, she made it her personal mission to find every baby so I could make sure to catch it. She spent HOURS wading through the water and yelling, '"THERE'S ONE!" and then supervising its retrieval.
I can't say that I minded. Mila managed to find 3 babies that were about an inch long, so they were worth saving. The others, the veeeerrrrry tiny ones, were -meh-. I didn't want to be responsible for all of their deaths, but there wasn't much I could do about the whole situation. Still, Mila made sure a few hundred made the move. I've spotted many of them since, so it was probably worth the extra work.
And then there were the frogs. Mila decided to make it her life's work to make sure no frogs were left behind. My personal theory on the frogs living in our pond is that I didn't invite them, so they are welcome to come and go as they please. They can jump out of the way, so there's no need for me to personally rescue them. They magically show up no matter what I do, so why care?
Mila cares. A LOT. She caught at least six of them and personally escorted them to the safety of a nearby plastic tub and she LOVED every second of it.
Seriously, it was the best day of Mila's life.
There's just one problem. Now that Mila has had a taste of being allowed to stand in the pond and catch frogs, she thinks that's what she's going to do every single day always. I yelled at her at least 24629351390 times today to get her feet out of the pond. Her response each and every time? "I'm just making sure my friends are okay!"
Oh boy.