May 2013

So.  Our backyard.  Remember when we moved in and it didn’t look the greatest?

We knew that the onset of spring meant we needed to tackle taming the backyard.  Our plan has been to mow and water and hope grass grows.  Does that sound like a stupid plan?  Because now that I’m writing it down after looking at that picture I’m thinking it does, especially when you consider we had two problems.

First problem:  We didn’t have a lawn mower.  After borrowing my parents’ and Dallas’s dad’s mower several times we finally bought one.  Check.

Second problem:  We don’t have sprinklers in the backyard.  Our plan is to have Dallas install sprinklers even though he’s never done it before.  Does that sound like a stupid plan?  Because I’m a little worried.  Dallas is completely confident that it’s not that hard.  Our entire house so far has been a do-it-yourself project so I guess the yard might as well follow suit.

We had some rain.  It turned our backyard green.

Hope.  That’s what you see right there.

We had more rain.  And now our backyard looks like this:

Doesn’t that look kind of good?  A little sparse, but I do see grass!  More hope!

Until I show you the next picture:

This is actually what our yard looks like.  The previous picture was a close-up of that red, rectangular piece of our yard.   Sadly we only have one little area that actually looks like it has a reasonable amount of grass.  Everything else is pretty much weeds.

Here’s a close up of the weeds:

Those weeds are what you see in these areas of our yard:

Believe it or not, Dallas has been out nearly every evening picking bucket after bucket of weeds.  In other words, he is planning to hand weed our entire backyard.

He passes the time by listening to books on tape or by bringing the iPad out with him and watching movies on it as he works:

Sometimes we all join in on the fun:

I thought Dallas was crazy when he first started weeding, but now I’m actually seeing progress and it doesn’t seem quite so overwhelming or impossible.

Will we have a somewhat decent-looking backyard by the end of all of this?  While the weeds are proving a worthy opponent, we will not rest until our children can run barefoot in our backyard!

P.S.  Sometimes I feel bad about sitting back and writing blog posts while Dallas is weeding so I have been trying to find times to go out and help.  It’s just hard because usually a meal needs to be fixed.  Or cleaned up.  Or kids need to be helped.  Or laundry needs to be done.  Or something else like that.  One night I was able to put Spencer to bed early.  This meant there was still plenty of daylight for me to go out and help weed.  I gave the girls their bedtime snack and jokingly told Brooke to put Caroline to bed after they were done, and she did.  If it means getting out of putting kids to bed, I may find myself weeding more often!