First Day of Preschool 2013

 Ella and Britton started preschool last Tuesday. I was actually in bed with the dreaded stomach flu, so Cary took these pictures and sent them off to school. ☺

The Yard (August 2013 update)

This just may turn into a gardening blog, and this is why you take pictures...☺

I've been meaning to post these for a couple of weeks, so already when I look at these I see how much we've already done since I took these.

It's amazing to me how much progress we've made in a year, I never would have imagined that the yard would look like this already. A year ago we were bringing in dirt to build the yard up so that we could plant lawn.

We've done a lot of work! It's been fun though, huh Cary?

The mystery tree.
It was a little bush when we first moved in, and I've been slowly trimming it up to be a tree, and I thought I knew what kind of tree it was, but I started to realize I was wrong.
We finally correctly identified it yesterday (it's a Mulberry tree), and it's going to have to go as it will not fit in the space that we have here.

In the middle of this picture is a rose bush that we salvaged from Teresa's old yard before they knocked down the house. It's doing impressively well. ☺

Another rose bush that we saved from Teresa's old yard, and for most of the Summer we thought it was dead, and then it finally started growing and it's so pretty!

I'm loving this butterfly bush

We salvaged these 4 Euonymus bushes from the trailer yard  and on the end is an Arrow wood Viburnum bush.

One of our Pear trees. Both pear trees have fruit this year, but we only have ONE apple on our apple tree. No peaches this year.

The poor bush that looks dead is another Viburnum and in it's glory days, I really loved this bush. It's not liking life right now, but I'm hoping by next Spring it will be ready to come back to party!

This is my "Bombshell" hydrangea. So far I love it and I hope it survives the Winter.

 At this point it started raining on me, so I had to come back a few days later to finish taking pictures.

I'm trying to propagate roses under the glass jars. ;)

Close up of my hydrangea

The lilac bush has been there since the glory days with Fay and Wally. I just trimmed it really good last year and so this year it's looking pretty good.
I planted a weeping peach tree (in front of it in this photo). Hoping it makes it through the Winter, it kind of had a rough start.
In front of that (in the picture) is a rambler rose that we also salvaged from the trailer yard. (I think Anita planted it?)

You can't tell, but I have two rose bushes in there... and that's my freak Marigold bush. I had to cut it back so that my roses can get some light. Theoretically, the marigolds are supposed to help with pests getting on the roses, but 3 of my rose bushes have aphids, so clearly they aren't a lot of help.

The two little trees we planted here, the one in the front of the picture is a "Robinson" crabapple, and the one further back is an Eastern Red Bud.



The pile of bricks and rocks waiting to be put to good use. ☺

Summer Picnic 2013

The Summer picnic this year was on August 24th. Again with the rain... it's usually fun to hang out and visit at our picnic, but this year there were storms all around and it was overcast (which was nice) but it was definitely more of a "eat and run" type picnic this year.

After eating, cleaning up and everyone was headed to their cars, the rain started pouring down.

 It was Mary's birthday so we sang to her.

August 2013 Summer Concert

A few photos from the August concert.

Rain has pretty much threatened (or ruined) pretty much every outdoor event that we've planned this year. ☺ Thankfully they went ahead and planned to do it outside and it was a very pretty evening.

Aidan and Alyshia