Playing "House"

Last night, Bryan and I were talking about having a baby, and I told him, "I can be the mommy, and you can be the daddy," as though we were playing house like I did when I was a kid, playing with my sister and cousins. Bryan nodded and then asked, "Can I be the boss, too?" I paused, thinking about what I might be giving him permission to do, then told him, "Sometimes."

Dirt Moving Day

Wow!! What a Saturday. A fun day of moving 3 tons of dirt from the front yard to the back. We wanted to raise up the area behind our beautiful retaining wall, so Bryan ordered and had delivered 3 tons of dirt. It didn't look like much in a pile in front of the house until we had to shovel it into the wheelbarrow and dump it in the backyard. Well, I mean it as a "Royal We." Really, Bryan had most of it done before I even woke up. He's such a sweetheart. Don't worry, I helped when I woke up. Then I cleaned the kitchen while he went to bed early. See last picture below. :)

Anyways, after we got all of the dirt dumped and smoothed out, we went to Home Depot (my dad always says that it's not a Saturday without at least one trip to the Depot) and bought thick plastic and 45 feet of light brown astroturf. We laid out the plastic first, to keep weeds out, and also to keep mud from coming up through the astroturf. Then we laid out the carpet and nailed it down with giant 10 inch spikes and washers to keep it from poking through. Now our dog run is all carpeted, so the dogs won't track in so much dirt, so they won't get all muddy when it rains, and so they won't have to walk on hot rocks/gravel. We hope this turns out to be a good idea and they don't destroy it. Now, if only we can pry the dogs away from my dad! He loves them! Even if we can't get them back, it looks like nice smooth gravel, and the best part is the easy maintanence: we just hose it down, or use the leaf blower!

Such a hard worker! He fell asleep while taking off his shoes! Only got half-done before he was snoozing!

Well greetings all from Fall Break!!!! Its been a little over a month since our last posting. Well we've been busy, I guess you could say a little bit too busy to post. So where do I start? Currently Candace is on fall break and I've decided to join her for a few days why we re-do the back yard.

But before I let you know what were doing in the back yard, I'll let you know what we've been up to. Really we've been hanging out not doing too much. Unless you count the long weekend we

recently took to California for some fun. We went a few weeks ago to go to the USC football game. We went over with my mom and stayed with
Grandma and Grandpa Stone for the weekend. We went over on Thursday afternoon and then on Friday we went to Disneyland! The picture to the left is of me in front of Matterhorn Mountain. As you can see a beautiful day in always sunny southern California. The forecast had called for rain, which worked out very nicely for us since people believed the forecast and didn't come out to play. We were able to walk on almost all of the rides with no wait times. So all in all a very nice time at Disneyland. On Saturday we slept in late, ate some nice home cooked breakfast and then headed off to the fashion district for a little shopping. Well Saturday wasn't as sunny and nice as it was on Friday, but it made

for a nice day to shop as we traveled around the streets looking for the deals.
After shopping for the deals we headed off to the LA Coliseum for the game. It was a great game with a little bit of rain with the sun still shinning on us. It was great and to top it off USC won!!! After the game was over we took a little stroll around the Coliseum to check out the history of it. It was pretty amazing.

Which brings us to the present week. We planted our winter lawn last week. Cut the grass down nice and short and as you can see from the pictures it's coming in nicely. Should fill in nice and thick over the next week or so. Also today we built us a little retaining wall along the back of the grass area. We got the retaining blocks that had the stone look to them. It adds a really nice look to the yard and even gives it a little bit bigger feeling to it because of the blocks. In the first picture of the yard we planted a new tree to add some nice shade to the area. In the same section we are also going to put in a pond. That is the project for Thursday, to finish digging the pond out. Should a fun filled day of digging. We've been soaking the dirt to make it easier to dig it all out. After which off to HD or Lowe's to check out which plants we want around the pond and the tree. Well once we get the pond all in we'll post some new pictures with the plants around it.