the tramp

It took us a few months but, with some helpful reminders from the neighbor kids who saw the box, we finally got approval from the HOA to set up our trampoline in the back yard.  Dan wasn’t very excited about it being back there but the kids sure were!!

  

Sophie’s a natural beauty, but has a hard time making natural smiles for the camera. ;) Jacob can’t keep his hands off the power tools, he’s going to hurt himself someday!

 

Tessa made herself a swing on the tree with a jump rope.  Just a big cheese factory with this girl!

 

August stuff: splash pad, painting, surprise party, picnics, and sunsets

We went to a cool park that has a splash pad one day.

  

 

Here’s a couple random pics of the girls playing.

 

In August we repainted the entry, the first color we tried (SW Crushed Ice) turned out too blue in there.  After doing LOTS of reading and staring at a couple dozen paint chips I collected from all over that I had taped up on the wall for weeks, I settled on 2 colors to sample.  The darker color is BM Revere Pewter and the lighter is Valspar Oatlands Subtle Taupe.

 

I really liked both of them and could have gone either way (I changed my mind every other day looking at the swatches, which I painted EVERYWHERE) but we ended up going with the lighter one on the left of the door, Oatlands Subtle Taupe.  The Revere Pewter was a little bit too brown for what I was going for and was too close to the color of the carpet on the stairs.

In August, we also hosted a surprise birthday party for our friend Jake. Kim’s so on top of things, I should have been doing this for Dan!  When he first saw all of us in the front room he looked a little… mad.  I don’t remember thinking he was mad, but that’s definitely how he looks in these pictures!

 

There, now he looks happy!

 

That’s all of the photos I got for some reason, I think I got too busy being a hostess, it was really fun to have our house full of friends!

Over the summer the girls really liked to have picnics out back on pleasant evenings.  Check out that grass, btw!  It came in nice eh?  We’re pretty happy about it.

We enjoy lots of sunsets looking out the back of our house, one day while looking at the sunset I commented that we live in a beautiful place.  Now Sophie says, “Mom, we live in such a beautiful place!” every time she sees a sunset in her sweetest sarcastic voice.  Children are a perfect mirror aren’t they?  Mine copy everything I do and say.  For better or worse!

front yard

Speaking of yards: Dan and Matt did a TREMENDOUS amount of work trimming the pine tree in the front yard back in March.  It had branches down to the ground and dead pine needles that had pilled up over years of neglect that filled several 30 gallon trash bags!  I wish I had taken a before picture, but I just have one of the front of the house, that just shows a bit of the tree on the left side.  It took the guys all day to clean it up, but it made SUCH a difference!  We had neighbors coming over to tell us that the tree had NEVER looked so good. It was a really big improvement.  I've been told by a few reliable sources that we will need to cut the tree down eventually, but I don't want to think about that now.  You wouldn't believe the volume of tree limbs involved in trimming it up.  It took us a couple months of putting out 5 bags a week (our trash service's limit on green waste) to get rid of all of it!   And look, there's a border and landscape rocks!  We had no idea. :)  Yay.

before:

after:

 

Thanks so much for coming out to help Matt and Cami!  They even got us these stately shrubs for our front door AND a new welcome mat as house warming gifts.  (Matt said our old one was an UNwelcome mat) I really really LOVE them.  I practically skip out to water them everyday, totally look forward to it.  Thank you so much guys!

 

And you can't see him too well in that picture, so here's a close up of our gnome.  Dan's other brother Jason gave us this little guy, as is the tradition when any of the Chapmans buy a home, Jason gives them a gnome for their yard.  Jason doesn't wrap it up or anything, he just puts him in the yard for you to find later.  Silly Jason!  Sophie calls him Gnomeo (from the Gnomeo and Juliet movie) and tries to sneak up on him to see if she can catch him coming to life. :)  He welcomes all who come to our front door, and thanks to our wonderful family, it's presentable!  Sure I can list off things I'd like to do the the outside of the house (replace the gold lights and door handles/kick plates, and house number, with aged bronze, PAINT!) but it's just baby steps, only a few things at a time right?  More home-improvement projects to come!

 

the back yard - step one: growing grass

Here's our back yard April 9th, 2012.  Just a couple days after Dan and his brother Matt planted seed.  Nothing had grown yet, so this is the starting point:

Here's another picture from 2 1/2 weeks later, on April 26th.  Looking a little bit better (the leaves on the trees sure help huh) when you can compare the pictures side by side, but we felt like NOTHING had happened.  Like we were just crazy people watering our weeds and dirt 3 times a day!

And here it is today, June 14th which is almost 10 weeks of watering, 1 round of fertilizer and 2 rounds of weed and feed.

We bought a mower and an edger last Saturday and 9 weeks after planting the seed, Dan gave it it's first mow, pretty exciting for us!  Parts of the lawn are still pretty sparse but other parts were very tall and thick!  Those weeds were gnarly, but the weed and feed had shriveled them quite a bit, it's awesome stuff.

 

It's getting better, hopefully in another month or 2 it will be mostly filled in.  Growing grass takes patience man!  I really understand what the saying "Just sit around and watch the grass grow" means a lot better now.

Funny story:  So notice this plant growing in the back yard in the first couple of pictures?  I drew in an arrow for you to see.

Well, I noticed that months ago and I thought, "Wow, they (the previous owners) did plant something in the backyard!  How nice."  Then a few weeks ago it flowered!  How lovely.  See?  But then I looked up and into the field across the road from us and saw that it was FULL of the same thing!  HA ha ha!  Shows how plant ignorant I am.  I laughed OUT LOUD at myself.

Dan dug it out and we sent it to the dump on Monday (you can see it's gone in the pic from today, if you scroll back up there).  I thought it was pretty funny.  We have a lot to learn.  I don't plan to plant anything else this year, if we can get the weeds out, rake up all of the old rotting leaves and grow a lawn I will be satisfied.  Plus I am scared to plant anything, because we have too many rabbits!  Do you have rabbits?  How do you keep them from eating your garden?