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.