Some weekend pictures

Here are a few pictures of our weekend "fun" ... although Bobby would probably describe the weekend in very different terms!

(By the way, I'm stealing this collage idea from my friend Melissa's blog ... I love the classy look of these collages, not to mention the practicality in being able to display several photographs in a smaller amount of space.)

First, here's the yard before we got started. Note the boring boxwoods and hollies directly in front of the house. We didn't really know what to do with them ... which for the past several years has amounted to precisely nothing, short of a cursory trim around the holidays. On the right side of the house, the hollies had grown so tall they were covering part of our windows!

We spent Saturday trimming lower limbs from the larger trees and digging out everything but the monkey grass, which I plan to relocate to a different bed. Look at that huge stump -- I hope the new plants are as happy as these old ones obviously were!

We amassed quite the pile of debris on our curb -- good thing brush pickup is this week! And now, knockout roses, kaleidoscope abelias, lorapetalum, and verbena await planting ...




The roses, abelia, and verbena will go in the bed directly in front of the porch; the lorapetalums are going on the other side and will later be joined by some azaleas, butterfly bushes, and hydrangeas -- a sort of acid-lovers' delight. Annuals of various types and a small azalea bed on the side of the house will round out my plans. We just didn't have the time (not to mention the money) to do all of it this weekend!

We did manage to get in a bit of nice family time on Sunday. After church, we went to Bobby's grandparents' house for lunch with that side of the family, and I caught a few pictures of Maggie in her pretty dress. It's odd, this dress. I ordered it from the same company I ordered her Easter dress, both size 5's. The Easter dress was so long that my mother-in-law had to cut a good 6" off the hem, while this one was much shorter than I like (I like her dresses to be long, especially dressy church dresses). Luckily, Lynda found a cute blue gingham that matched perfectly and was able to sew it to the dress hem for added length.

Although Maggie pronounced the whole weekend "very boring," she seemed to enjoy playing in the yard with us, and I am excited with the way the yard is coming together. Stay tuned for some "after" pictures ... hopefully by the end of the week!