Out of Doors

This is a short and un-expert video of our Family starting the hole for the trampoline at the beginning of spring.

The earliest beginnings of my garden this year. These were pumpkins. Sorry it's blurry.

Enjoying a bike-riding day, perfect for picture taking.

The front view of our house, Lilacs, tulips, daffy-down-dillies, Iris and strawberries have all come a long way!
More lilacs, some blue phlox, and bleeding hearts. See the new gutters?


This is from the north front corner, looking across the yard, past the front door.
The north side of our yard, where we planted some grapes, hoping that the heat caught by the neighbor's garage would be just what they needed to flourish.
These trees were planted just after Tag was born. Four here, at the north of our lot, and six in a row at the east side of the garden area. I cut them all off about fifteen inches above the ground. All but one peach put up with it admirably. I want short, wide, manageable trees, and lots of them with manageable yields of fruit.
Here's our completed trampoline installation. The hole extends about two and a half feet deep in the center, but is only one foot deep at the edges. The legs have been shortened to stand the top about 18 inches off the ground. It took about two weeks of infrequent digging, because of rain, to finish, but was completely worth it! We love not having to worry so much when the kids are playing on it, and feel it is so much safer.

Below, you can see the trees near the garden better.
Pears, peaches, apricots, plums, and apples. Also, raspberries. Which went crazy this year.

Before much was planted, just onions, spinach and lettuce there, and the raspberries coming back.
The arbor Ty made is simply gorgeous, even when completely bereft of greenery. Next to it on either side, he built planters for me to try the desirable type of morning glory this year. Next year, we'll try sweet peas. The benches, are perfect to stand on and wave hello to the neighbors and hold garden tools and harvested bounty really well. We don't spend a lot of time sitting on them though.

These are the peas that I started growing in early March, here on the south side of our garage, thinking they would be warmer there, in the cold months. They covered most of the wall and gave us pounds and pounds of peas in the pod that were delicious. They were done by July, so, before I thought of taking another picture of their bounteous glory, I pulled them off the trellis. The trellis is there, you can see it just against the dark earth at the bottom, and in the window reflection. It's uv-treated plastic mesh about 7 inches square, and is fastened about six feet high all along the wall with masonry screws and a wire woven thru it.

Tiny little corn peeking up here.
Iris. Love it!
I love pink lilacs!
Our first strawberries!
Great ground cover, but tricky to pick later without stepping into the bed.
We had a lot of visitors to the garden this year. A covey of quail frequent our yard. Here's one of them standing on just one leg. Below is a bird that nearly brained itself flying into one of the sun room's closed windows. Ally brought it in to recover, and the kids had fun holding and petting it for a half-hour.

Simply delighted by this little bird. You should have heard the squeals of laughter!

Thank you, Vanna! Smile, Brynne!
It was really fun for the kids, and they were glad to help it get better. We let it go that night also, and it was able to fly to the hedge next to our garden, just fine.

Things have started getting abundant in mid July. The horizontal slats you see through the arbor is a bench glider that is perfect to sit on once the shade hits it at about four pm.
We'd never seen a red praying mantis before.

There are the Morning Glories!
The peas are gone by this point, and these are spaghetti squash, cantaloupes and tomatoes.
I just love it!

The rest of these pictures are more recent. This is a long shot of our back fence and the future garden bed I'm trying to put in there. It will have flowers, and herbs and shrubs and maybe a new peach or nectarine tree. And I have some legally purchased Sego Lily seeds to grow there as well.

My whimsical wavy garden edge is not all I hoped it would be, but there's plenty of time to work with it. You can just see the raspberries far off in the distance.
Here are the grapes, which almost cover the side of the garage now. Also the trees near the sandbox did great this year. We got about three pounds of grapes from our vines this year, and hope for some tree fruit next year, maybe.

This is what the front garden looks like now: Autumn Glory Sedum in back, petunias, snapdragons and an orange daisy-ish flower that self-sows like crazy!

Our cute baby boy! Read from bottom of post to top.

He's been our earliest to try crawling. He's just almost ready to take off. A few more days of rocking back and forth on hands and knees, and then he'll be figuring out moving forward without the flop. And then, stairs are next! Watch out world!
Good Job!
Then flop back on the floor, a few inches further than where you started!
Teeter for a moment or two. . .
This is how it works: You push up onto your hands and knees. . .
Lizzy loves her brother, too.

My what big Eyes you have!!
What a grin! He's pretty sure he's adorable!
Learning to roll has it's drawbacks. He got stuck against the wall at Grandma's house! Mom, put down that camera and rescue me!!!
Before, and after he falls asleep, for one of the last times in his moses basket.

Lovin' the bouncer.

Oh, come on! It's not that bad!

He is such a happy baby!

AWWWW!!

That's right! I'm a cutie!

Super Baby, to the rescue! (He did that all on his own!)
Now they've got him surrounded!
A moment free from the tyranny of big sisters. Ope! there's another one!



This is a long overdue look at Taggart Morgan, in no particular order, and largely sans captioning. I don't know why that is underlined.

I just found out you can't rotate them once they are on the post. Oh well. This is just so cute of Ally and Tag together. He's always been a little koala baby.
Crazy Eyes Lily has him now!! That's a rather ineffectual punch, little brother!
I so love snuggling with a new baby. Maybe a week old here.

This was his first Day. April 3rd 2010, almost six months ago. He's sitting with Grandpa Morgan, while mommy and daddy sleep, and the siblings mill around. Lily had to be restrained from the very beginning so she'd be gentle with him.

It does seem that the youngest pictures are at the bottom, and the most recent are at the top of the post.

And so it begins...

...er, well, continues.

"Help me Robert, Help, help me Robert"

Thanks for looking at this:

For our first phase of the Kitchen Remodel Project, we are going to convert a front hall closet into a kitchen pantry. The picture below is an artist's rendition of what the final project may look like. We're not really in love with the blue and the green parts, but we're certain that we really don't like what they are drawn over. Except for the picture of Christ, that we really like. . . er, love. Of course.

The perspective is a bit skewed, but it conveys the basic idea. The stove will move over to where the dark brown cupboard is, and the pantry will take about a foot more on either side of the closet. The cupboard that is over the stove will have to be removed. We'll change the door from the hallway side to drywall and framing, and put a 45-degree angle door in, that faces the kitchen. Shelves and organizers, and all the miscellaneous nonsense on my counters will be tucked into the new pantry and Marie will cartwheel across the yard for joy!

The next project will entail creating a new traffic pattern for the kitchen. As it is right now, our kitchen is just a glorified hallway from the front part of the house to the sun-room and basement. We want to close off the current door, and pass-thru and make a new access in the far right side of the living room that is four feet wide. The new entry would also require cutting back counter-top and removing some currently almost useless drawers and an upper cabinet. I'll have to relocate my fridge as well, probably putting it over next to the new pantry. Framing in the open spaces seems pretty straight-forward, but this is a load-bearing wall, and we are understandably wary of knocking parts of it out without some help. Let me know what you think, and thanks again for looking this over.

Ty basically figures he can handle the pantry project, but I think we'd benefit from some guidance. And your help would be invaluable with the new entrance to the kitchen.

I'm thinking that there are some great deals on cabinets from newspaper classifieds and craig's list, so that's probably what we'll be replacing our crap ones with if we can find something suitable. We are not going to spend fifty thou doing this, but we do want to pay for your help, and not sparingly. If we can get good help, we can make do with second-hand cabinets.

There's a new baby at our house!!

Literally!

Taggart Ray Morgan was born on April 3, 2010 at 11:45 am after a stinking-hard, eighteen-hour-long labor, and the worst pushing EVER!!! He was born at home, surrounded by family and friends and weighed 10 pounds, 2 ounces, and was 22 inches long. His hands are about three inches across.

He's enormous. But still little, anyway. I'm well aware that Mom has me beat here and there's no way I'm going after that championship title. No thank you.

He is such a cutie though and we love him so very much. He has dark, shiny, soft short hair, and velvety, albeit peeling skin, dark baby blue eyes and the sweetest little lips and busy baby tongue!! From this side of things it is easy to forget that he was 13 and a half days overdue!

Tyler is elated. The siblings are delighted.

Lily is ULTRA-possessive. ("My baby! My turn!")

And Marie is exhausted--but she didn't tear, even a little bit! YAY!!

Hugs and kisses to all! Thank you for your love and prayers!

Now we just need a collective fast to end this perpetual winter weather!!! This is the view from our back door, right now. No kidding. It's obscene! We're supposed to get 12 inches. . . grrrr!