Terrible week...but productive weekend!

Last week was a long week for us. You know when you have times that are just "off" and you're all sort of cranky and tired, and nobody feels normal? That's been our week. Will had to go up to Vail, CO for work a couple of times and those are always kind of long/rough days for him with everything he has to do. Thursday was a birthday party for Kaylee's friend, but for some reason (my brain wasn't working??) I thought it was on Friday so I got the kids all pysched up but then realized we totally missed it. I thought the kids would never stop crying! I took them to Chick-Fil-A with the same friends to make up for it, but we're still sad we missed it.

On Thursday Will's truck started acting really weird, overheating like crazy and shaking all over the place. On Friday morning we took it in to the dealership (he has some deals there for free diagnostics and oil changes) and...the engine was shot. Due to a leak in the radiator it overheated so much that it cracked a cylinder and the entire engine would have to be replaced. UGH. So Will got it from the shop to about 4 blocks from our house when it totally died and we had a guy come out to tow it/scrap it for us, and of course we got barely anything for it. So lame. I wish we would have sold it last year when we were thinking about it!! We're still down to only one car (which I'm not worried about, it shouldn't be a big deal), and we would have made so much more money on it if we'd done that. Oh well. Life goes on! And I'm really, really glad it didn't break down when Will was up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. It was good timing, considering.

That night we were still all sad about the truck, and we got some texts and emails from our bank warning us about a possible fraudulent charge on our card - which it was, luckily we have that all taken care of. It's just been kind of a stinky week for us! We're glad it's over.

We had a really good Saturday, however, and we made even more progress on our front yard. Our neighbors think we're insane with how much we're out there working. Last weekend we finished a few little things and we got grass seed planted. Our new grass is growing in now, we bought some more roses and a Japanese Maple, and we finished our little rock area for the trash cans on the side of the house. We're very happy with how everything is turning out so far. Our new tree lost its leaves pretty early, but we're not worried about that - transplanting is always tough.

Yay, little grass seedlings! Grow grow grow!!

 

I don't know if you can see the Japanese Maple or not. It's just to the left of the big bush there and looks like a little purple haze. It's VERY tiny, and it's never supposed to get very big. We love it. We have all four rose bushes that we want, now the question is, can we keep them alive?? The one on the middle left looks pretty bad, it had a hard time this summer. It's doing okay now though and I think it'll be just fine next summer. The summers here can be a little tricky because they'll go from really wet to really dry all the time, so we have to watch out for that. Also, I apologize for the trash in front of the garage. I was too lazy to move it...

One of our neighbors walks by our house with his dogs fairly often and every time he does when we're out there, he tells us how awesome our yard looks. He says he's been in the neighborhood for 20 years and it's never looked better, which I don't know if I completely believe because it's just...not that great yet, but hey, I'll take it!! Nothing like some nice compliments for a bit of motivation.

Stumps, trees and bicycles.

So, remember my last post about landscaping and everything we're doing? Well, we got a few quotes to grind out that stump in the front yard. We were completely 100% planning on having someone come out and do it. It was just too big and solid. But you know what? We HATE spending money on labor -- apparently. On Saturday my husband decided we were getting that stump out, by ourselves, by the end of Monday (Labor Day). On the outside I was all "Okay! Sounds good!" and on the inside I was more like "Ummm...right...." because we'd been picking at this thing for a while and not getting very far. But we actually had the entire thing out by 10am on Monday! I dug, he chopped, and we just worked non-stop till we got it out. It honestly wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. The roots were enormous, but they were pretty shallow, which made all the difference. The first picture here we'd already gotten out more than half, so this is not a "before" picture.

The first thing Will did was take an ax to the middle of the stump and dig out as much as possible where it was rotten on the inside. Then he had to separate the root sections on the main part of the stump till we were working with a few different pieces.

And it's out! The pictures do not do it justice. That thing was a BEAST.

As soon as we had it out, we cleaned up and dug a giant hole for a new tree. We went to a little tree farm near our house and bought a pretty little (okay, not so little) Honey Locust tree. It just so happened that about 30 minutes after Will came home with the tree, the missionaries came over for dinner. We didn't plan that at all. ;) After dinner, the elders helped us get the tree out of the truck and set into the hole. It was a LOT harder than any other tree we've planted (read: bigger), so I'm extremely glad that we had the elders there to help. We wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise. We've always just bought little saplings before, but this time we wanted something that was already a decent size.

Now all we have left is to clear out the rest of the rocks, level the ground, put in grass, and do something around the tree like bark and bricks, or whatever we decide to do there. That sounds like a lot, but we're almost done with the rocks and the rest shouldn't be too bad. I don't think.

In other news...

We gave Kaylee a scooter for her birthday, because she'd been begging for one for months. Then we had a friend in the ward who gave us her son's old tricycle, and she much preferred that. Unfortunately, so did Ben, and nobody wanted the scooter, but they both constantly fought over the trike instead. So I sold the scooter to a second-hand store and we bought her a little bike instead.

She struggles with getting-going and stopping still, but she's pretty much got the hang of pedaling. It will definitely be a while before I'm willing to take off the training wheels though :) No rush there. She always tries to stop by leaning back, like she's on a horse or something. It's pretty funny, but I really hope she gets the hang of pedaling backwards to stop soon, so she stops crashing into people and things!

Ben cracks me up on this thing because he can't quite reach the pedals, so he just pushes himself along with his feet. He really gets going on it! The first time he went down the driveway (which has a slope to it) he went FLYING and ended up in the gutter, which was a little scary but he was fine, and now he's got the hang of it so that he can go down that fast and still stop on the sidewalk.

This is basically what the kids do the entire time we're working out in the front yard. Back and forth, back and forth. Oh, and they're extremely friendly to every neighbor that happens to walk by. Sometimes too friendly...but they get to pet lots of dogs and talk to a lot of people, so it's good.