Weekend Recap

I don't know about y'all, but our weekends are always very busy.  Not just the weekends, but the week days too.  It's go, go, go all the time and often I find myself trying to figure out what we can let go of/not do so we can just hang around the house and take care of things here.  I chose this past weekend for doing just that...taking care of things around the house (or really the yard)  I had noticed the massive amount of leaves in our backyard that were piling up on the fence.  I had secretly hoped that big strong gusts of wind would magically take them away, but no such luck with that.  Now that the temps have been creeping close to the 80s, I started to worry about snakes making the leaf pile a cozy new home and knew I had to get those leaves outta here so we could enjoy the backyard.  Luckily, the kids were easy to convince that raking the yard would be fun!  They were so excited to help me...for about 5 minutes.  Then they just jumped in the leaves, which was fine.  They loved it!  Below are some pictures:

Jackson helping rake the leaves.

Madeline of course had to help out too.  She only used the rake a couple times, threw it down, and used her hands. ha!

Jack and Madeline getting the leaves into a big pile so they can jump into it.

Taking a break from raking, jumping in the pile.


During the raking, I had a slight scare.  I happened to glance down where the rake was and notice a little black head.  I immediately thought it was a snake just because we have had snakes in our yard/neighborhood.  I sent both kids out of the backyard and to see if any of our neighbors were home...of course they were not.  I sat there contemplating what to do at which time Madeline chimes in "Mommy, just kill it"  To which I replied, "How do I do that Madeline?"  her reply "With the rake mommy"  (as if to say, duh come on mom, you got this)  So I sucked it up and put on my brave shoes and went back to raking the area where the "snake" was.  After a few pull-backs of the rake, there was the little head again...another pull back of the rack revealed this little guy:

A slimy salamander...whew...no snake (this time)  so we set him free over the fence and I returned to raking the leaves.  3 hours later and I was worn out, the kids were bored, tired, hungry, thirsty...everything except excited to be raking leaves.  So we stopped.  3/4 of the way done, we stopped.   So we will get back out there and finish it up soon.  =) 

I also picked up some little flower seeds out of the dollar bin at one of my favorite stores and decided it would be fun for the kids to plant the seeds and watch them grow into flowers.

Jack and Madeline were excited to plant the seeds (please ignore Madeline's short shirt...she insisted on wearing it and I choose my battles these days)

So the kids got the seeds planted...notice the pink flower pot missing???  Yea, it broke so we had to use something else.  I guess 1 causality is not too bad.  I can't wait to see the flowers bloom.  I'll share pictures when they do.
Speaking of pictures, I share a lot of pictures.  I always have since I started this blog 3 years ago.  Well, today as I was uploading, I got a notice that I used up all the 1GB of free space available for posting pictures...boo...sniff.  Of course there was an offer to buy more space...are you kidding me?  So, I looked into that (fearing it would be a ridiculous amount) but it was not, only $5.  So I bought more space cause I just can not post without pictures.  Has anyone else had this happen to them???

Hope that everyone had a great weekend!