Before Pictures. . .

Not sure why this is underlined.  This is the south side of our garage, notice the garage door in the front, fence in the back, and the brown trim and broken gutter.

This is the front of our home, from the street, still the brown trim and gutters, but this pic shows the improvements we made to the front garden beds, but it's from earlier this year, when none of the plants had come to life yet.

South side of the Garage, just dirt. It was weeds and garbage, mainly cigarette butts.

This is the front garden bed closest to the garage.  Very weedy, and full of garbage.  It did have tulips, sedum, an orange daisy and iris that have done well, with a bit of dividing.  The concrete bricks along the front of it are put in wrong, and they're just in front of the sidewalk.  We took them from here and put them on the other side of the door to build up that bed.  Also, they had black plastic edging along the edge of the concrete driveway.  Go figure.

These three pictures are of the south end of the back yard.  There was a cruddy old fence and gate around an even cruddier old rodent-infested woodpile.  Also a lovely chain-link fence spanned the entire depth of the yard from the gate to the back of the lawn.  The area on the other side of the fence had been a junk yard and car lot, and was still full of bit and pieces of garbage.

Haven't you always wanted a totally random lamp post growing out of your back patio?

In this one, you can see how deep that back corner is, way out there. We really do have 

a large lawn, which is wonderful of course. The white irrigation riser was inconvenient here, 

so this year Ty moved it, which impressed me greatly!

This was what the front garden bed looked like before we did anything with it.  There weren't gutters along the front of the house on the north side, so all the water just pounded into the ground where it fell from the roof.  The edging bricks are put in with the front side up, instead of forward, and there were only weeds in this area.  Neighbors tell us there were beautiful hedges and an amazing flower garden here before the previous owners tore it all out. 

Saturday in the Springtime!

So this year spring has teased us three or four times.  The weather has warmed up beautifully for several days, and then been followed by quick plunges back into snowy weather.  It's almost like Spring wakes up for a few minutes and then goes back to sleep, whining just like a kid who doesn't want to get out of bed.  "Aww, Mom!?  Just five more minutes. . .*snore*"  

I'm done being demoralized by it though.  I think by April 18, it's safe to say that Spring might be here to stay.  Part of my angst is driven by the fact that I want nothing more in the world than to be able to get working on our garden.  We have a bunch of improvements planned for our yard and property this year and we're ecstatic to be able to get started.  Here are few pics detailing where we are starting from, followed by where we've gotten to so far.

This is the Picture from Google Earth, taken before we moved into the house, probably two years ago.  As you can see the previous owners used the southern triangular bit of the property as a junkyard, for parking cars, trailers and storing lots of junk.  I'll add to this later.

Again with the backward thing:

So this note should be a Post Script to the last post, but it is up here, and not down there.  Whatever.

There is a reason we are sick, but I'm not going to point fingers.  So, I'm not going to point fingers.  Love you all.  Please keep us in your prayers.  You are in ours.

We are sick!

All this fall and winter we managed to stay pretty healthy.  I try to stay on top of sniffles and sneezes, mostly with elderberry extract and homeopathic remedies.  Also Grapefruit Seed Extract.  All worth it to me, because they seem to work keeping us well.  

  But now we're sick.  Oh, SOOOO SICK!

Deathly ill, according to my poor kids.  Coughing, (which is the silliest, non-sensical spelling of a word, EVER!) sore all over, raw throats, boogers everywhere, other unpleasant-ness, and general misery.  It's a glamorous life, isn't it?!?  

   I hope you've avoided this, but if not, please leave me some reassurance that it will be done soon!  I'm having a hard time seeing the light at the end of this tunnel.

This is something great that I've found. You may Enjoy it too!

Being a homeschooling Mom and a cheap one at that, I've discovered this great website that has great free items every day of the school week.  Things like Audio tracks of famous speeches from history, cute coloring books like the well-loved Kewpie books and Goops from the 1930's and 40's, even lesson plans and enrichment ideas on educational topics.    They have lots of interesting old-time resources that have been dusted off and digitized and made useful for a new generation of learners.  I really enjoy it and I think you might too.  Give it a try.  The address is, www.homeschoolfreebieoftheday.com

This week their line-up includes,  lesson plans, virtual tours, poetry and the actual papers of presidents Washington and Lincoln, a Chinese Wonder Book in PDF format that is a collection of Chinese Stories and legends about the rich history and culture of China.  There's also an old-time radio dramatization of the story of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railway, a high school unit study of character development for Christian young men, and an instructional ebook about how to make butter in your blender.  What fun!!   

I mean, who doesn't want to know how to do that!  They change everyday what resource is available, and so you have to check back.  We've gotten a ton of great stuff and I'm very glad that we have been doing this for the past six months or so.   

In other news, I got my hair cut, and I think I really like it.  I'll post a picture as soon as I get one taken.  Love ya!  

I just thought this was newsworthy.

A moment ago, I was looking for the stapler.  Couldn't find it anywhere.  Then Lizzy came around the corner with it in her hand and a grossed-out look on her face.

"Oh, great!  You found it!" I said.

"Yeah, but it's still all yucky," replied Lizzy.

"What happened to it?"

With an obvious note of scorn and disgust, she said: "Kurt tried to staple his peanut butter celery."

Well, then.  Now I get to clean peanut butter out of my stapler.  But at least I have a great mental image to entertain me as I do it.

Wordless Wednesday