Swimming in Fish Water Makes Me Wanna Yough

Hey yaallll, it's Grace. Today was Monday which means three things. Today's meatless Monday. You see my mom read Bob Harper's book "The Skinny Rules" and the whole family is trying to get healthy. One of the rules is to make one day a week meatless so we decided to make it Mondays. As hard and UN-fun as it may sound to anyone reading this, I'm actually enjoying it. I feel a ton better just on my health level, we're all a bunch more active, and we're trying a lot of new foods. For instance, just a couple weeks ago my mom made this vegan non-meat protein for our tacos. I thought it tasted way better and it was a lot more filling. Instead of eating 2 tacos and still being hungry I had 1 taco and was full. Today, we tried vegan hotdogs which were not so good. I'd take a regular hamburger any day. Sorry, not a big hot dog fan. We also tried meatless chili which was even better then regular chili and it had a lot of beans in it. Also, instead of using sour cream we used plain yogurt and if my mom hadn't told me I wouldn't have known the difference. Of course nobody's perfect; one of Bob's rules is to give up all sugar, but today we made cookies with half a stick of shortening in it. We do try to follow most of the rules though, and we keep adding new ones as we get better with the other ones.

Next,  today is also Music Monday. Every Monday I'm suppose to give my sister a piano lesson starting today. My mom's paying me seven bucks to do it!  I'm hoping to get some experience so I can teach other kids too. If these things are sung to the tune of "Manic Monday", meatless music Monday is truly unforgettable!

Today, my dad went grocery shopping so the rest of us could stay home. How nice! My mom took Camden, Lauryl, and me to the pool. I played with my friends, swimming and carrying on and later I got out to play tether ball. You should note this is not your normal nice game of tether ball. The ball is as hard as a soccer ball and its going about a hundred miles an hour. You were lucky if you escaped alive!

When we came home we helped put away the groceries. I then proceeded to do what I do best; I sank into another world only found in my book. The funny thing now is that because we're home-schooled (yes we are homeschooling now and yes it is different from cyber school), we can start recording school today. That means all the educational stuff we do for fun counts! So, I got 2 hours of reading, an hour of gym for swimming at the pool, and several other educational/fun things including time for writing this blog.

In the evening we headed for the Yough River. We dropped my mom off at the trail because she wanted to run. See, we're working hard on the exercise part of our health too so she met up with us later. We brought our kayaks and carried them down from the parking lot, and yes I do mean WE not just my dad, then we got in the water. It was absolutely freezing! The bank dropped off really deep before you even had time to get used to the temperature and it smelled like dead fish! At this point in time you should note the title of my blog since it took us some time to get use to the smell.  We then swam over to the other side of the river, and jumped off a 10 foot rock into the water. I must say that it was quite a rush!


When we came back my mom gave us a brief science lesson on the things around us like the trees and waterfalls. Next we started kayaking. I worked on my roll a little, but I couldn't get it down before I got too cold. I must say though, the last two attempts I swallowed about sixty gallons of Yough water..yuk. Afterwards, Camden got in the boat and worked on his roll too.  He did it the first time, but struggled some after because he was thinking too much.

We we got home we had some of that chili I was talking about earlier and we sat around the campfire. Mom encouraged me to write today's blog for school time so that's about where I am right now; sitting at a fire, writing the blog for school, and saying goodnight for now.