From Brown to Green...

Alright, for those of you that read the title and were expecting a detailed, chronological photo-journal of Annabelle's bowel movements, you will be sorely disappointed.  This post will only be tangentially related to our little one.  Mostly it's about a lot of hours spent over the weekend making the backyard more cohesive and inviting.

So we are little ashamed to admit that over the last two years we have basically let our dogs act like a horde of pillaging vikings in the backyard,  which gradually turned our lovely, green grass into what looked a raving lunatic systematically killed all the grass in the center of the yard as some sort of political statement for government satellites watching his every move. Okay well maybe not that extreme, but all the canine romping around really took a toll on the grass.

The previous summer we had spent the better part of a month designing and building our 2000+ gallon koi pond and water garden, but whenever you go in the backyard all you ever looked at was the giant patch of gray Florida "soil."  Thanks to our well-behaved infant and the extra help in town, we decided to finally tackle this project.  Since Laura "just gave birth," and Annabelle proved to be less than efficient with a shovel, it was up to my Mother and I to accomplish this.

Since Florida "top soil" is a mix of mostly sand, shells and discarded pieces of Disney rides with unacceptable fatality rates, we were forced to buy top soil to supplement.  So for everyone in Minnesota who is laughing right now, yes I purchased soil.  Two yards of it was dropped off in the driveway which I carted to the back in a wagon, by hand.  That might not seem like a lot, but it was a little wagon and two yards of top soil weighs about 4,000 pounds. I have no idea why we wait until the middle of the summer in Florida and choose to do these projects.

After we spread that and evened out the soil, I fertilized it with Milorganite and mixed it all in.  Luckily we got about an inch of rain that afternoon, so it we got to skip that step.  The next day the pallet of sod arrived.  After moving all the dirt the day before, 2,500 pounds of sod seemed to go very quickly.  My mother was kind enough to help in all this, so I took the mule job and she arranged the pieces and watered as I carried them in.  Once the sod was laid, we decided to finish the project that day and completed the rock path from the patio to the fire pit.  So off to the Home Depot I went to get 30 bags of rock.  And later that afternoon there were two very tired people desperately in need a hose-down to get into the house to shower:

But the backyard turned out great and now looks like this:

And after all that work, my mother was kind enough to get us a stone bench and bird bath! Thanks!

We have been exceedingly happy about the change and couldn't be more thankful for the help involved.

Side note: we are working on a Flickr account because we have had many requests for more and consistently updated baby pictures than is appropriate for the blog venue.  We will keep you posted on that and hopefully that will be up and running shortly. 

As always, thanks for reading!

Nathan (and Laura)

Oh okay, I'll post one more baby picture... :-)

I think this look is Blue Steel.