Dallas had a birthday! The girls got it in their head that we needed to play musical chairs to celebrate, so we did. Good thing too since Spencer looks like he’s having the time of his life:
After our rousing game of musical chairs, Dallas opened his presents:
A movie and candy. We really go all out for birthdays around here:
Then we had a little Oreo pie to end the party:
You may or may not have noticed that our blog wasn’t working over the weekend. We got some complaints.
Let me tell you what happened. Rebecca created her post about our hiking trip, but when I tried to access our blog, it took so long to load that I was able to look up our web hosting support number and call them. This has been an ongoing problem with our host, and by the time I was able to get through to a human, I decided it was time to move to another provider. I gave the poor support tech a somewhat aggressive, “I want out now and I want a refund”. I then went and talked to Bluehost and signed up with them. That is when the blog went down. I made changes to our domain thinking that I could get it running again in no time. This did not happen. Little did I know that I would have a couple of problems, the biggest of them being that I had malicious code in our blog. Our old host who’s name rhymes with SlowMaddy didn’t even notify us that there was a possibility of a virus, but Bluehost recognized it right after I uploaded the files. After about a combined two hours with Sam and Alex from Bluehost we are back up and running! My shout out goes to Sam and Alex for their above average tech support. They were just awesome!
I knew that Bluehost is based out of Provo so I had a bias from that, but I also went and read some reviews. Here is my favorite one. This is a real review.
“They’re based in Utah and owned by Mormons. Seriously.”
Got to love that! I’m now a big fan of these guys because of all the help they’ve given and the lower price for our hosting plan. Additionally, they don’t allow inappropriate websites on their servers, so we won’t be blocked by those of you who are blocked to our site because of your firewall settings.
Now I just have to go through the same process to fix my business website.
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!
We went sledding this last Saturday. At least Brooke, Caroline, and I did. Rebecca and Spencer stayed at home. Caroline immediately decided that sledding was too scary. She wasn’t able to handle a 10 ft. long hill with a 5% slope on it. Brooke on the other hand loved it and was more than happy to take up the slack for Caroline just wanting to skip out and go home. Brooke started out small, but by the end was wanting to ride the long hill. You can see that in the video.
Dallas and I went on a fun date. We went canoeing down the Provo River:
It was so beautiful and peaceful to be on the river.
We found little baby sparrows in a nest under a bridge. I’m not really an animal person (understatement), but those baby bird heads poking up above their nest was the cutest thing I’ve seen in a long time:
We also climbed a wall. Just call him Spiderman:
Special thanks to my mom for babysitting the kids so we could have an evening alone. It was wonderful!
