Seasonal Firsts

This past weekend we had our first snowcones of the season!  Kind of. We don't have a gluten-free syrup yet so they ate shaved ice, Beth's plain and Luke's with some Crystal Light lemonade.  They loved them just as much as they loved them last year, except Luke can hold his cup a bit better this year!  Yay!  Last year Beth was never a big fan of the syrup anyways, she usually just had plain shaved ice.  I don't know what flavor to order for her, I want to be sure she'll like it since the bottles of the gluten-free syrup Ryan found online are $15 each!

We've also started working out in the yard again, quite a bit.  I haven't gotten a picture yet but last weekend Ryan picked up some rocks and we laid out two new beds in the front lawn for more trees.  (We had a grand total of 5 trees in our actual yard before we moved in!)  I don't know when we'll plant them but we do intend on getting a few more quick-growing varieties.

Our backyard construction has begun, and quite by accident!  We've had workers on our street for about two weeks now, replacing out water pipes.  Needless to say, there's been a lot of extra dirt.  And, guess what, we needed dirt!  So we asked them to start dumping it into our backyard, thinking even though it's not the best, cleanest dirt in the world, it's FREE!

Both boys liked watching the dirt get dumped in the backyard!  Have I mentioned that Jack is making car sounds?  Pretty incredible.  Anyways, we had a total of 7 dump truck loads over the course of two days dumped into the back of our property, the lowest part (also previously known as our swamp, if it would ever rain this year).

Then, this morning I got an offer I couldn't refuse.  Thinking we were going to have to spend the next three months spreading out all of this dirt, I was starting to figure out ways how to clear up my weekends.  But, a worker (el jefe, I assume) came and asked if I wanted him to spread it all out for a little bit of moolah. Um, heck YEAH!  We had been quoted over $800 for a guy to dump 4 or 5 loads of dirt plus spend time smoothing it out.  Compared to that, plus all the images dancing around in my head of Ryan throwing out his back, all of this was looking pretty good.

We left the house for a book club meeting and when we came back our yard looked like this:

Done!  And pretty smooth too, not perfect but I think he and I can handle this in a single weekend!  I was kind of sad the offer didn't come another day though, I had wanted to invite all of my friend's kids over for a party in the dirt!  The kids got one good romp in the dirt the day before yesterday, I have a lot of pictures I'll put up in a different post. :-)