One of THOSE Weekends

With Glen only home for weekends now, our Saturdays and Sundays feel jam-packed!   This Saturday, in amongst all the regular kids' activities,  Glen and the kids spent most of the day working on the yard.  We're hoping that clearing away some of the leaves and branches might make it a little less inviting for our little mouse invaders.   While they were out working, I was doing a major purge on the inside of our house.  We've lived here for almost 18-years now, which means we've had a lot of years to accumulate stuff.  In other words...it was a long day!

At the end of the day, we were all exhausted and ready to relax for a while, but the house had other plans.  Not satisfied with our efforts to make it a BETTER place to live, it opted to show us who was boss...and it clearly isn't us.   

Our plumbing line from the kitchen got clogged and our basement flooded.   It was gross.  It was expensive.  And it did nothing to improve the state of our home.  

One step forward...two steps back.   This fixing up the house stuff is clearly not my thing. 

And after that crazy weekend, on Monday morning I got shoved  into my place of abject humility once again when I heard a little mouse skittering underneath our sink.   I go to scare it off/see if it was caught...

Nope....

Lo and behold, there was the vile creature right there in plain sight, running freely and happily as Mickey himself, in amongst the SEVEN traps we have set up down there.   He skillfully navigated around all of them and disappeared before I could think of the irony of it all.    And then I got mad.

How mad?  

I went to Amazon and ordered mousetraps in bulk.   In BIG bulk.  

I will prevail.

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The Kite Flyers

What better thing is there to do on a beautiful windy day than to head to the park and fly kites?! 

We fly kites just infrequently enough that when we do do it, it's like a dream come true for the kids.  

The fact that there was actually windy enough weather on a day that was also beautiful and mild, and a day that we had enough time in our schedule to drop everything and head to the open spaces of a local park, is an unusual enough occurrence that the kids would have happily stayed there all day.   

Unfortunately we had to leave eventually so that I could take care of the jungle that our yard had become.   Our neighbor's yard is green, lush and meticulously cared for, which makes our yard look all the worse with its weeds, bare spots, and ragged edges.  

I am teaching Adam to mow it, so at least now it's short and weedy instead of looking like an overgrown chia pet. 

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"When the winds of adversity come, remember one thing--kites fly the very highest against the wind. Kites don't fly in spite of opposition, kites fly high because of opposition. In fact, they couldn't fly without opposition." 

 John Bytheway

Working Hard...Playing Hard

Day 1 of Memorial Day weekend:

• Church activities (including 2 baptisms) starting at 9:00

• Copying the programs

• Home for Saturday chores

• Take a load of junk to the dump

• Take another whole load of stuff to Unique (a consignment store)

• Go to Home Depot and buy my belated birthday/Mother's Day flowers. 

• Come home and have a flower planting party. 

• Get cleaned up and put on swimsuits

Including goggles, socks...

winter boots...

and cute smiles.

• Come home at 8:00 and scrounge together some deliciously easy bagel and lunchmeat sandwiches. 

• Put kids to bed while Glen takes Spencer to take care of his weekend dog-sitting job and run a couple of errands.

• Blog while daydreaming about how quickly I can get in bed when the boys get home.  

Flower Power

Every Mother's Day weekend we have a tradition that we head to Home Depot,  fill the back of our van with flowers and soil and spend an entire Saturday shoveling, raking, tilling, and planting making our yard beautiful in the process.  

We're a couple of weeks behind this year due to Glen's recent bout with getting sick only on special holidays, but yesterday we officially finished off our Mother's Day festivities and made sure that Home Depot can stay in business all in one fell swoop.  

Glen and Emma filled the flower boxes along the stairs with pink petunias and white impatiens.  

Glen filled the pots by the door with multicolored dahlias and hung a pretty hanging plant.  

Adam, Ellie, and Cami helped me rake, till, dig, and plant in our little mailbox patch.  

Of course our mailbox still holds a special place in my heart due to the long hours I put in assembling it.   I love how these lemon zest petunias ended up looking with the red salvias behind them.  

In the middle of our mailbox plantings, Adam's moth hatched out of its chrysalis.  It doesn't get any more exciting for a six-year-old than being able to watch the transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis to moth right before your eyes, even seeing him uncurl his wings and dry off.  I was even fascinated.    

As a side note, these lemon zest petunias are my new favorite!  I had never seen flowers quite that color  before and I loved the pretty splash of color they brought to our yard! 

We took this little patch where our strawberry plants are and planted some peppers, carrots, basil, mint, cilantro, and the rest of the flowers that didn't fit in the other places.  Now if it weren't for the fact that I broke the lawnmower this past week by adding the wrong kind of gas to it, our yard would be looking almost perfect right about now.  

And after all that hard work on a humid day,  we were more than ready afterwards to take a splash in the community pool that just opened up for the summer.  

Just in case you're wondering where Spencer is with all this hard work around to do....for the last week and a half he's been in Canada whale watching and seeing the sites with my Dad, brother, and sister (pictures coming soon)!