House Reflections

Adam and I renewed our mortgage today (exciting right?) which marks 5 years since we bought our first and only house. When we moved into our house (we actually moved in here 6 years ago but didn't buy it until a year later), the house was brick red and the 1/3 acre yard had absolutely no grass on the property... just a wild overgrown "jungle" of trees, shrubs and weeds. It was beautiful but untamed and it's "low-maintenance" yard was one of the reasons that my grandmother (the previous owner) was attracted to the property in the first place.

Back of the house 5 years ago

Back view of the patio... all of the brown bare patch on the ground was covered in silver nettle and sweet sicilly that was about chest high! And the wooden patio was rotten, so in this picture we were in the process of tearing it out and replacing it with brick pavers

And here are a couple that show how it looks now;

still very natural and a bit wild, but with with pretty garden beds for my girls to pick strawberries and flowers from,



and flat paver patios for them to play hopscotch and ride their bikes on...

Being new homeowners, we were anxious to dig in and starting making the place our own... the house where two of our babies came home from the hospital to; and the place where the day we moved in here, Laina made the transition from crib to "big girl" bed. It was here that we also made a home for my aunt Katie who had suffered a brain injury after being struck by a car at the age of 8 until she died of leukemia only one month after Evelyn was born. I am still so thankful that she hung on long enough to hold Evelyn... she loved kids and especially mine, more than anything in the world.

Here she is holding Mylie wearing one of her funny hats after her chemo from the first cancer - uterine cancer

So for the last 5 years, we have mainly focused on getting our backyard ( and some of the house) into our vision for our family to live and play in. This spring was the first time I have begun to tackle the still very overgrown front yard. There are a lot of things we can't do in the front yard due to eight 100+ ft cedar trees plus the placement of our septic tank (yup, we live in the boonies enough to be on septic rather than sewer, yuck!) So I started small this year and fought back against the overgrowth in one fairly small area and turned in into a flower bed.

A very young Mylie and Laina... the overgrown foliage behind them is where the newest garden bed sits

And this one, the mess to the left of them is indicative of what our entire yard looked like 5 years ago (although this picture was probably only about 3 years ago)

Well today, after we had our appointment to renew our mortgage, we finally put the finishing touches on the bed by encircling it in rocks to start a new pathway through the yard. Big rocks like this are expensive to buy, but a really nice guy was giving them away on craigslist, so my kind husband lugged them home in the van. So to finish off this long and sentimental post, here are some pictures from today of the new garden and my family that I love so much! (Okay, minus Evie because she was napping right them)

It doesn't look all that fantastic from this angle, but I didn't even notice at the time that Adam was being a goof and doing a "who the hell are you" (it was a feature in FHM magazine where people sent in pictures they had taken where some random person they didn't know had hopped in the picture and posed) Can you spot him? Amazingly enough while I was taking this picture, I did not...

And from another angle where you can see the rocks :)

This is the creepiest picture I have ever taken of one of my cats!