Yes, you read it right. Yard work, I have decided that yard work and I have a love/hate relationship. I love doing yard work, it is fun and tiring and rewarding to see your beautiful yard when you have slaved in the heat and been scratched and dirt is so thick under your nails that you would think you have things growing under them (your own walking personal garden). But boy is it exhausting!
We moved into our new house almost 2 months ago, and I am more in love with it now than I was the first few times I looked at it, I was so excited about the potential for my own garden (not the one under the nails, but a real garden to grow veggies and stuff, I mean how hard can it be, everyone I know seems to have a garden, I guess we will see how hard it really is next spring), planting flowers, bushes and trimming trees and all things out-doorsey that was calling my name gave me spring fever. Well let me tell you, spring fever in the summer in Texas is not a good thing to have, and I am so not the only one in this house that has been bitten by the spring fever out-doorsey bug. My wonderful husband has been bit as well, as has Haley, Sierra and Ella. At our old house, we didn't have trees...well let me reiterate, we did have trees, they were Bradford pear trees that were so far away from the house that they were pointless to even have. We didn't have grass, we had these weed things that if you weren't careful they would eat anything on the ground, and nothing you could do would make it go away so you dealt with it and pretended it was grass. The girls were dying to go outside and play, but there was no shade or anything to allow them to go outside and play. Let me put it to you this way, I took Sierra by our old house not long after we moved in here just to pick up the last few things we had over there, and she flipped out because this was not her house, this was our old house and we didn't live here anymore! And she made sure I knew that we were in the wrong place. Now don't get me wrong, we LOVE our old house, it was great, it was beautiful and had a great open floor plan and room and it was a wonderful house, but we outgrew it, we bought it when it was just 6 of us, and 4 bedrooms was perfect and then...we had 2 more and that house became really really small really really quickly.
So anyway, back to my yard work (bear with me, I tend to drift from time to time, I think all the years of pregnancy and raising kids has given me permanent brain damage). Our new house has all kinds of trees, but since we live in Texas, just about everything died, and I don't just mean they stopped growing leaves, I mean 115 degree temperature walk outside to water and you might just have heatstroke so everything becomes so dry and dead that if you look at it funny, it just might burst into flames and Lord help us if someone throws a cigarette butt out the window, that will cause a fire the likes of which you have never seen (there should be a number to report people who do that!). So at the entryway of our driveway is this beautiful (used to be in the spring until we hit record highs for a record time frame and rain just laughs and us and teases us for 4 months by lightening and clouding up and then leaving) archway of trees, no clue what kind, but they were beautiful, full and green. Now, they are scary looking and missing half their leaves because they died and what leaves are there are just this ugly brown color. So we do what anyone does who has spring fever, we get pruning sheers and start getting rid of the branches and raking the leaves and watering some bushes (no clue what kind, but they have purple flowers which automatically makes them my favorite bush in the world) to hopefully nurse them back to life...but the catch is, it is still summer temperatures in Texas, so we do all of this when the sun goes down. Luckily we don't have neighbors on that side of the house, or I am sure they would think that we are insane, but all 6 of us are outside until about 11:00 at night cutting branches, raking, loading it in the back of the truck taking it to the back of the field in hopes that one day we might get to burn again, or the city might do a limb pick up or something, anything to get them away from where people might see them and it might take away from the beauty that is our brand new (to us) house.
So now we get to the hate part of our relationship. I HATE loading limbs into the back of the truck, driving for 30 seconds and unloading for hours on end. I HATE looking at my kids who are so filthy they look like homeless children and I have to scrub the bathtub after a bath because it is so nasty from the mud and dirt and grime (and yes they have their own personal gardens under their nails too), I HATE sweating and being scratched by branches and bit by ants and mosquitoes.
Would I trade it for anything? Nope, how could anyone trade the looks on these beautiful homeless looking kids who are so exhausted they can barely keep their eyes open, but are so excited about making our new house beautiful, and playing outside and riding their trikes and scooters and running and playing with sidewalk chalk and laughing and then falling asleep so excited to get to do it all over again tomorrow. I guess I love more than I hate about the yard work, so tomorrow night, regardless of how tired I am, I will again take all of the kids out, leave the electronics in the house (oh yeah, no phones, computers, anything are allowed during our yard work times), and just get back to nature, the way God intended it, just us taking away the dead and dirty parts and throwing them away so that the new can come forward.
(my two beautiful "homeless" children before their bath and crashing for the night, the biggest love of yard work)
