Green Thumb Anyone?

Well, after a week of late nights at work, some rain, and a couple of irritable girls, the garden is now complete. The other big adventure for our family this week was the purchase of a fence. With so much to talk about, I better begin.

Last weekend Jaynee decided that we needed a fence for the girls. They need a boundary to keep them safe, as well as to provide protection and structure. Jaynee made a couple of calls on Monday and by the end of the day she had a contractor lined up. Wednesday work began, but due to the lead worker being a little ill, work was not completed until Thursday afternoon. The girls just loved it. They can now run from one end of the yard to the other without being yelled at, picked up, or even headed off. It sort of reminds me of what a cattle herder does all day except that these beast are on two legs and know how to work together to make it that much harder for the herded.



Due to my late work schedule this week I was not able to get home with enough time to work on the garden before it was dark. We had time, but about 1 hour before sunset is the girl’s bed, so that factored into our schedule. I was able to take half of Friday off, and I plan on doing the same for Monday. It is nice to take time off when the boss is away. Monday night there was some rain, but not enough to turn our dig site into the canals of Venice. I was hoping there would be enough water to warrant the purchase of a remote control boat to play in my newly formed canals. Maybe luck will be on my side when I am tasked to create a strawberry patch later this year.

Friday Jaynee and I were able to complete the frame and clean up the dirt. Most of the dirt went back into the garden as part of the foundation for the step stones, but there were about three loads that I needed to dump out back behind the fence. The only thing left to do was to put the stones in their place, and then mix the dirt (after purchasing it of course). So after a late night Friday, Jaynee dragged the entire family to Home Depot at 6:45 in the morning. The ratio of employees to the number of people in our family was staggering. I think we lost time because we had to politely decline the help of every employee working at that time at least twice. After a couple of other stops, we returned home to continue working on our garden. After playing with the girls and getting them nice and tired, we put them down and worked on putting the paving stones in. Just as we finished that, the girls got up, so we decided we would stop until their afternoon nap. All we had left to do was mix Jaynee's soil mixture. The soil mixture contained 3 parts of peat moss, 1 part cow manure, 1 part mushroom manure, 1 part manure toasts, and 3 parts vermiculite. Don't ask me why the weird stuff and mixtures. I just figured out how much we needed and then perform all the muscle related tasks to manure. The mixing was a little fun with a strong wind, manure, and trying to mix each of the ingredients with the use of a twin size sheet. We were finally complete and with only a bag or two that I will need to return for a refund.


After cleaning up from playing in poop that I just so loved to play in (Jaynee was lucky that we didn't have a manure fight, or I would be writing this post from a hotel room somewhere in Augusta.) we decided to treat ourselves to a nice afternoon out. We have learned that our daughters do so much better when we eat an early dinner. After our night out, we put the girls to bed and then the planting began. This will be a learning experience for sure. Minutes before we began to plant our garden, Jaynee realized that some of the vegetables were for fall and winter planting. I guess we will be ready for our fall planting. Until then every open space was filled with radishes. So in the next 4-5 weeks we will see if anything edible will grow, because that is when the first harvest should be ready.



Not a lot of pictures of the girls this week (just got Sofi for some reason), but it was defiantly a learning experience on how manage home projects and the girls at the same time. There was several times when they were outside trying to help us with all the work that needed to be done, but after a while we had to pause to keep them out of harm’s way. Besides a couple of soar backs and a mild sunburn on my arms, no other injuries to report.

1.5 Projects Completed and Still Happily Married

Yes, Jaynee and I have undertaken several large projects to our home. The first of which was to removed all the pine needles used as a bed covering to our front yard flower patches. Then we dug a trench so that we could install a black boarder to separate the grass from the flower bed. Then finally we placed red mulch to give it a nice look. As the pictures below show, not bad for our first project.


The second project is has just started. What we thought would be only a day's worth of work, looks like it could be a week. We are building a garden in our back yard and to make it nice we need to make it level, so we are building a box. The box must have a border of paving stones on the top because of the way the water comes off the roof. Without the stones, there would be a 2 foot hole in the ground due to the water run-off. Well, after buying just about all the supplies and equipment that we would need, we started to dig, only to realize that a shovel was not going to get through the Georgia mud and clay that was below the grass. Jaynee ventured out to the store again and returned with a pickaxe and a mattock (a hand held pickaxe). Once she returned with those tools, what could have taken a full week to dig only lasted 1 day. It would have been shorter, but I still needed to complete some homework. The girls wanted to help, so we allowed them to join us and load up a bucket with dirt. They were able to stay outside with us for nearly 1 hour. That was pretty impressive. Shortly after that I needed a timeout to work on homework. So I went to work on homework and Jaynee played with the girls. After putting the girls down for the night we return to our archeological dig pit and finished it up. The next step is to cut the wood and create the framework necessary to support a garden and the paver stones. We were hoping to work on the frames Monday, but it looks like there will be lots of rain that day, so our dig pit will soon turn into the canals of Venice, Italy. There will be more pictures after our canals fill up.

These pictures show some before and after shots of our work thus far along with the girls helping us.

In Like a Lion; Out like a ???

Well, March is officially upon us. What does that mean? Well for starters, my birthday (but by the time anyone reads this it will be long over), March Madness, St. Patrick’s Day, hopefully Sofia's day in court to have her adoption to us finalized, and a few more doctor appointments (with 3 appointments on the 30th). In other news, Jaynee's mother and Belle (her service dog) came for a visit and to take care of the girls for the 5 different doctor appointments within the last week. The big one was Sofia's surgery to have tubes placed in her ears. The surgery went well, and the results seem to be really good.

I haven't seen Sofia in such a good mood since we got her. She is dancing, more aware of what is happening, and she is even trying to speak more. She has also been improving on her potty training, and except for one day in the last week, she has gone at least 4 times each day.

Sunday was a bummer of a day in the US Hockey Team lost in the finals bringing the end to our Olympic viewing for this year. At least the World Cup will be here later this summer. Well, everyone I hope you have a wonderful March. So far for us we nearly had snow and the average temperatures are nearly 15 degrees below normal. The forecast is looking nice with the possibility to hit the low 70s this upcoming weekend. I am so looking forward to the weather as I sit in my room working on homework all weekend long. I do hope the girls enjoy it.