Blog books

Lookie what came in the mail today! I'm over the moon excited with how they came out, they're like a super glossy high end magazine. They'll sit on the bookshelf right next to the half completed baby books.

We'll call him Mr. Belvedere

It's the small things in life that hang me up. So I've decided I need a butler. He'll do things like make sure my glasses are clean, my phone/ camera/ computer are charged, I have a bookmark available, my Tivo is up to date, Emma's t-ball pants are washed for her next game, Grant's pull ups are well stocked, and there is ample milk in the refrigerator. I can take care of the bigger things, like opening my own front door and answering my own (well charged) phone.

It's like a park

Before

After

I know, crazy rad.

Boy + hose = muddy fun

The dirt Formerly Known as The Pit is now a mud pit.



Can you see Grant's little footprints in the mud puddle he created? Give that boy a little trickle of water from the hose and he'll be happy for hours. He started out just squishing his toes in the mud, but eventually was sinking up to his knees and then making the muddy area bigger and bigger. At one point, he had a rut from the bobcat filled up with water and was splashing around in it. We had to strip him down naked and hose him off before he could step inside.

Woo-Hoo!

The pit has been filled in! Of course my front yard is trashed from the bobcat driving back and forth, and I've got a swath of dust on the street stretching the length of my property that just blows around the neighborhood, waiting for the street sweeper to come along. And my side fence is broken from where Dirt Guy had to remove it to get the bobcat into the yard. And I've got a scrub tree laying across the side yard, removed by the bobcat during one of it's trips from the front yard to the back yard.

But the pit has been filled in!

And Grant has a new career aspiration. No longer longing to be a Digger Man, he now aspires to be a Bobcat Man. He spent most of the last two days running from his room where he'd watch the bobcat drive by, to the sliding door where he'd watch the dirt get dumped into The Pit, to the couch to watch the bobcat fill up it's loader, then back to his room to watch it drive by again. And again. And again.

Mother's Day

Mother's Day this year really was on Thursday instead of Sunday. The Kindergarten classes hosted a Mother's Day Tea, complete with a concert and some hat making. The kids draped a square piece of butcher paper over our heads, taped it around our heads, then rolled up the sides to make a sun bonnet. Comical doesn't even begin to describe it. Emma also had a sweet card she'd written where she told me I was pretty and that I do "stuf relley well." She painted a vase with some flowers in it, which is now hanging on my bedroom door. And she filled in the blanks on a paper titled All About My Mom. The best part of that was where she stated I weighed 50 pounds, and my eyes were "green with a dot of brown." She also wrote that I don't like alligators very much. The Tea was was super fun morning of special girl time and yummy treats.

Grant had some treasures for me that day also. He had a bookmark he had colored and his teachers had added a picture of him and had laminated it. He also filled in a All About My Mom paper. He thinks I'm 9960 years old and that I watch "adult things" on TV. He also thinks I'd really love to have "hamburgers opened at the top." I have no idea what that means. The card was finished off with his handprints on the front.

Actual Mother's Day included a lovely lunch with my mom and Emma, then a leisurely trip through a bookstore where Emma selected her first diary. Tinkerbell, of course. She's decided she's going to write special things she wants to remember, and her first entry described the ginormous dessert she had eaten at lunch.

It's been a relatively calm last few days with the kids, which has filled my heart up to full.

Closing the chapter

We're closing the chapter on The Pit this month and moving into a new chapter of our lives, that of Functional Backyard. We've been through a lot with The Pit - a new liner, a new deck, a new pump motor, more submergable pump rentals than I care to count. It's basically been a nightmare since shortly after we moved in and we're eager to get past it and forget it.

Dirt Guy comes Monday to fill in The Pit and compact down the dirt by driving his 8000 lb Bobcat over it as he fills it. Then Landscaper Guy starts May 17th with ripping up the concrete path, the rotting rosebushes and the old lady neighbor's overgrown bushes that are invading through the wire fence. By the end of May, The Pit will be a fading memory while we cavort and cartwheel all around our new grass complete with functional sprinkler system and raised bed garden.

It's going to be awesome.