The Yard, Current Progress

So, I've taken a few recent pictures of my yard and here they are:

I've started putting in a flower bed around the front part of the fence, which is slow going because Scott has to dig before I can do anything. Also, I have no yard budget, so all my plants and flowers are pilfered from my mom's yard and Janae's neighbors (all donated, not stolen).

It's part vegetable garden and part flower bed.  Here are the veggies:

...and here are some of the flowers:

I know the pictures aren't that great, and really, neither are the flowerbeds.  But the garden is a work in progress.  Next year it will be georgous.

I've also decided to move some of the random plants that have started growing where I don't need them to places that are hard to mow. Since we are on the corner we have lots of stuff in our yard that we don't want like two telephone poles, a stop sign, a no parking sign, and some wire things coming off the telephone poles. I don't know how to use a weed whacker so I'm going to surround those things with pretty plants instead of tall grass.

Example:

I'm putting hostas in the few places in the yard that are mostly shaded.  Next to the back porch and at the end of the driveway.  Next to the porch they are looking kinda silly, but I will work on that.

(Sorry about the ugly picture of the dirty driveway)

Despite the crappy pictures, the yard is coming along nicely and it's not a bad place to hang out these days.

The Yard, Part II

Up until last summer when we put in our white picket fence I didn't really like my yard.  It made me mad that there were no normal spaces to put a flower bed or a vegetable garden.
I don't even have any pictures to show any progress made over the 2 or 3 years because there wasn't any.  I just didn't like going outside in my yard.  Here's one picture I found from a few years ago that kinda shows how boring my yard was.

And it also shows two cute girls!

But anyway, so, that's what I've been working on. Progress has been made!  More on that to come in a bigger, better blog next time...

The Yard... In the Begining

When we moved into this house the yard was a disaster.  Back in 2003, we had to destroy and rebuild.  Since then it has been a never-ending work-in-progress.

  

We are on a corner lot and the house is positioned in an odd spot on the lot so there is no real front or back yard, there's just one giant side yard. There used to be a random chain link fence running through the middle of the yard.  I'm not sure of it's purpose, so it had to go.

 There was also a tree stump about the size of our dining room table right in the middle of the yard.  If there were still a tree there, it would have been really cool, but there wasn't so we removed the stump.

We removed a lot of weeds, vines, trees, and poison ivy

...and we flattened out this part of the yard.

A giant hole was dug to make way for a door to the basement. 

It was a lot of work to get the yard to look somewhat normal.  Not a pretty yard, but it would do for a while.   

More on the yard to be continued in my future blogs...

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!

Allyson is a little liar!  Her favorite lie to tell these days is, "I accidentally kicked her in the face."  I don't know how many times I have come into the room where the girls are playing and Molly is screaming and crying and that is what I hear from Allyson.  She believes that if she calls something an accident she is off the hook.  WHATEVER!
Today, when I asked her why Molly was crying she sold me that Molly accidentally hit her neck on the wall.  I told her I didn't believe her because that is impossible! 
So, I sat her down and told her that I'll get more upset with her if she lies than if she did something wrong and just told the truth.  She seemed to get it.
A little while later we went on a walk.  I showed her some wild strawberries and told her that she can't eat them because they might hurt her and that she couldn't eat anything she finds outside (a good general rule, I think). She had one in her hand and was facing the other way, I say " you aren't eating that, are you?" 
"...No"
LIAR!!!
Then she was playing with rocks from someone's garden and wanted to take a handful with her.  I told her to take two and leave the rest.  She asked if she could take three and I said no, only two.  So, she stands up hiding her hand.
Me: " did you take three?"
her: "...no."  So I checked her hand... LIAR!!!
My goodnes, she is driving me crazy!  ...at least she's cute:

 

For the birds!

This is on our porch right outside our bedroom window.  It makes for a cool learning experience for Allyson, but at 5AM, it SUCKS!! 

Now What?

Since Molly got the 'Betes, we've been keeping her used needles and lancets in a little coffee container (untill recently, everytime I opened it it smelled awesome; but that's beside the point).
                                   Here's a random picture of said container:

So, now it's getting full.  At the hospital they told us to keep them in a plastic container; and we are.  But they never told us what to do when that container gets full.  Can I just throw it in the trash?  I would't think so, since we can't just throw the little needles in the trash.  What do I do now?  I have a few more days till this thing starts overflowing.

Oh, and here's a picture of Molly's new(ish) Medical Alert anklet:

 

It's pink!

House Fire

  So, I walked into Allyson's school today and was stopped by one of her teachers who asked me if we had had a house fire.  We hadn't so I said no.  She told me that Allyson was telling everybody that our house had burned down and we'd been living in a hotel for seven years.  It was the 'seven years' that tipped off the teacher that Allyson might have been making it up. 
  When I went to the playground to get Allyson, I asked her if she'd been making up stories and another teacher looked at me very relieved.  She had been worried about our family having to go through so much.  I guess she didn't hear that we'd been living in a hotel for seven years. 
  Allyson told me she made up the story because it had happened to one of her friends from school.  I know this wasn't true because I had just driven by that friend's house on the way to pick her up.
  I guess what I've learned from this is that Allyson is a pretty convincing liar.