Yard/Work

For years now, we've spent many a lazy Saturday morning yearning to be homeowners if only so that we'd have yard work to do. "Imagine," I remember telling Lena, "how satisfying it would be to spend the day working on our own land." And she would agree, dreamily. And we'd both sigh. And I might spend an hour or so searching through the property listings as result. This is one of those situations where you could imagine that once we actually did buy our own house (and its accompanying .22 acres of yard) that we'd think back on those old, wistful conversations and say, "we were out of our minds to wish for more work to do," but the reality is that, so far, spending our weekends doing yard work is absolutely a dream come true. It truly is everything we hoped it would be.

We have big plans for our yard. Just like the inside of our house, we'd like to make the outside into an entirely useful space. We'd like to grow as many fruits and vegetables as we can, and also incorporate a collection of dynamic kid play spaces and grown-up sanctuaries. There is a lot of work to be done, on top of the usual mowing and raking and weeding. Up until today, I've spent the vast majority of my yard work hours building the chicken run, which I finally finished last week. We gave our girls a good chunk of space because we're not sure how much we'll be letting them out of the run to roam the yard (mostly because we're not sure how much we want to be stepping in chicken poo). This photo collage shows almost the whole run (you can see one white hen in there, for scale):

I was definitely flying by the seat of my pants while I designed and built it, but I'm happy enough with the way it turned out (I was able to build it all with left-over fencing material that the previous owner had left in our garage, and one side of the run incorporates the fence that the previous owner built). At some point, I would like to add a chicken wire roof to even better protect the hens from predators.

Today I got to do some jobs that I've been wanting to do since before we moved in, but that had to wait until after the chicken run was finished. There was a line of useless, overgrown shrubs/bushes through the middle of one side of the yard, and I'd been aching to yank them all out of there. Our plan is to plant fruit trees in their place come Spring, but I couldn't wait until then to do away with the bramble. Leo watched from his perch in the baby swing while I sawed and clipped and hacked away (unfortunately, I did not manage to take any before/after pictures, but I assure you that the difference is incredible).

"are you sure you know what you're doing with that saw, mom?"
Leo looking skeptical in the swing, 4.75 months

And today Lena got a chance to fly by the seat of her pants, when she spent a few hours cleaning the gutters of our house (now that is one example of yard/house work that we never fantasized about . . . but that was still satisfying and kind of fun). When we bought our house, there were literally plants growing in the gutters. So we knew that cleaning them out was a priority. But it took us a couple of months to procure a ladder long enough to reach them (thank goodness for friends with big ladders).

My Love and the long, long ladder

Lena got right to work, armed with our hot pink dish gloves and one of our grilling tools, just exactly what anyone would use to clean the gutters, right? And she did a most excellent job, I might add.


The kids were not as involved in the dirty work as I might have initially hoped they would be. Luke and Jaz did spend some time chasing the chickens after they escaped under the hedge into the neighbors' yard, and Zeb was often by my side, requesting worms, but they were all three mostly just running around playing. And since the kids playing in the yard fulfills another huge, decade-long fantasy, that felt perfectly OK to me.


Jaz showing off his chicken-chasing skillz

We ended our work day with a wagon ride into town for ice cream (and ended up staying much longer, and having dinner and doing some sale shopping at our favorite, local outdoor apparel store). All in all it was about as perfect as a day can be, in spite of the fact that we forgot to bring a diaper bag with us (because that's the kind of mamas we are), and Leo had a bit of a blow-out, and we had to buy him a new prefold (thank goodness Cradle sells them pre-washed!) and diaper cover and a pair of pants. In some ways, the diaper drama even made the day more perfect. More reasons to laugh.


Leo's first ride in the wagon!

Looking forward to another day outside/working tomorrow.
Life doesn't get any better than this.

If you haven't had a chance to vote for your favorite pictures or enter your name in the drawing for one of the 3 gift cards, please do so by Sunday (11/22) at midnight, since I will be ordering photos and drawing names on Monday morning. Thanks for all of your fabulous input thus far!