Before
For awhile now, I have been wanting to have out backyard be a little more functional/beautiful. It started with Christmas when Santa brought the kids a cool fort. Since then, I have wanted to do something else, but didn't really know what. Thanks to several people for their ideas of planting, patio, etc...we now have a nice quartz flagstone patio in our backyard! Jeremy took two days off from work, at first to go to the desert, but since the weather was supposed to be windy, he was unselfish enough to help me with the backyard. He got a rototiller on Thursday and we rototilled our little yard in about 1 hour. There was some thick layers of clay that would make the rototiller jump! Pretty crazy. Bottom line, we should have done this right when we moved in, before planting grass. I guess we were just to lazy. We added some bags of good dirt that is supposed to break up the the clay.
After rototilling, we took out about 4 inches of dirt close to our fence, where we were going to put the flagstone. That was a lot of dirt. now it's sitting on the other side of the yard, waiting to go in our yard waste bin. We picked out our stone that same day and it was delivered the next day!
With all this hard labor, we sure slept well at night! We got the gravel and sand in, which was pretty labor intensive: filling up a wheel barrow at a time and wheeling it back. Jeremy and I took turns doing that while the kids and our sister in law Emily helped level and rake! Thanks Emily! It was so nice of you to help when you came to visit!
Once the sand was in, we filled up our wagon with the stones. The kids were such good workers and enjoyed seeing the progress. Stephan was such a huge help in putting our "puzzle" together. That was interesting to try and make every stone fit! We eventually had to "cut" some which meant breaking them, hopefully in the places we wanted, but usually not. Any time Stephan would try and make a cut, it would break some where else!
With the stones in place, we tried to get rid of the ones that wobbled, but we are hoping that will go away with time. I've put back some of the plants and planted the grass seeds, which we are now waiting to come up. Hopefully that torrential rain we had last Monday didn't ruin them! The rain was helpful as well to see where we needed to do some further leveling.
I was so anxious to have it finished, that I even bought some patio furniture before I even put the grass seed in! I do love doing projects. They help me to be patient and realize I don't need to hurry and get it done as fast as possible, but that I can enjoy the growth and development of it, steps at a time.
It looks great and we are all really happy with it. We had Jeremy's parents over for a BBQ and backyard campfire the other night. One of the things I bought was a fire pit. It was fun to do smores and to try and keep Scotty out of the fire. He's pretty smart, though. At one point, he saw us all putting or skewers in the fire with marshmallows, so he went and found his own stick and tried to roast his own. He's so cute! I'm glad he didn't get burned!
Every one who came on our first trip to Disneyland, Jan. 2009
Cozette fighting Darth Mal in the Jedi training on her date with her Daddy (Sept. 2009)
I think this was from our second trip. It was even fun in the rain!
Cute girls. They went around and took pictures and got autographs of as many characters as they could find.
Scotty after a nap.
Wyatt was the only one who got to go on his birthday since it wasn't blacked out.
Our second to last trip there. We usually were lucky enough to have one or more of my siblings come with us.
