Spring Cleaning

Last Friday and Saturday we decided to do an overhaul on our backyard. It started out with just pulling some weeds and racking up pine needles, but we ended up doing some heavy duty pruning and bush trimming and a lot of other things. At the end of all of the work we had a huge pile of branches and several bags of yard waste to get rid of. The kids were all pretty good sports about helping out. Even Jaxon wanted to lend a hand. We had one bag full of pinecones and Jaxon really had fun finding pinecones and throwing them in the bag.
One thing that stunk was I went grocery shopping that night and Jake accidentally smashed his finger when he was closing the trunk of the car. It was the worst finger smashing I've ever seen. His nail didn't break, but the flesh from under the nail squirted out like butter and was on top of it in a blob. Totally gross, and completely painful. He couldn't cut it off either, we had to wait for it to dry out and die before cutting it off. That was Friday night, and we had planned on taking all of the stuff to the dump on Saturday, but Jake was having a hard time doing any of that work with his finger in so much pain. Luckily, we had enlisted the help of some church members (one with a truck), who made a big difference in getting it all cleaned up and out. We still have some cleaning to do, but the big stuff is done. Our yard is pretty low maintenance, we haven't had to do any major work in it since last fall, and we never have to water. That is, until we attempt at bringing the patch of grass back to life. We'll see if that ever happens. Here are some pictures of the kids lending a hand in cleaning up: