Sleepy Again

Carson really is the king of crazy sleeping positions. I've had so many ridiculous sleep pictures of him like this. So here are some sleep shots from October and November.






Okay, so I got a funny one of Emmett too.








Once I took the blanket off him to wake him up I realized how he was sitting - tipped chair and all!

Snow

Sunday morning we had frost


And Monday night it snowed! This is a big deal, for the boys especially, since we typically only get a couple snows each year in Salem and they never last. Well, that's not true, I suppose we usually get one "bad" storm.
I couldn't help myself, I took two pictures from the front windows of our house.


"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas..." I know, we haven't had Thanksgiving yet, and personally I think Christmas stuff should wait to come out until after Thanksgiving, but I still like the scene with snow. The extra rows of lights are due to reflection on the window pane I was shooting through.


So, of course, today the boys had to go out and play in the meager quarter inch (max) of snow.




The "jackpot" was in our trailer.


Carson didn't quite get the idea of spacing


Emmett didn't get "snow angel" at all and just stuck to hand prints.


Then Avery took his kid shovel and scooped all the snow on the trailer in a pile so he could make a snowball with our snowballer.






Carson's turn


Emmett's turn. Yes, Emmett it falls out if you open it sideways.


Try again. Now it won't fall out. But grabbing it doesn't work either.


Avery desperately wanted to make a snowman, so I suggested he use the snowballer and make a mini man.


A leaf got caught in his scoop. "Is that his cape or his big nose, Avery?" His nose. That's some honker.


I'm thankful for our little bit of snow. This part of Oregon doesn't know how to function with even the smallest amount and more just exacerbates the problem. Also, I'm glad we just have this as opposed to the -5 degrees forecast for Spokane, where my parents are, that this same weather system is bringing them! I had enough sub-zero temperatures in four years in Wisconsin, thank you very much.

BBP Part 7 Epilogue

Yes, the BBP is already complete.

No, this isn't actually going to show what the yard looks like now. I've already over-loaded the blog with pictures of the backyard, I'm sure the point has been made.

I know I've already done Goliath and his Friends, but in all this work in the backyard, obviously we saw plenty of critters. The fact that I risked life and limb to hold the camera still for those shots makes me feel an obligation to myself to post the pictures. I promise this post won't leave you quaking like the Goliath post. So, here are some other critters we saw during the course of the project.

Back in March digging out the arbor vitae we found some grubs and an empty snail shell. We found four snail shells by the time we finished the summer.






Avery really wanted the grub to go in the shell.


Pulling out the bricks in the retaining wall found a lot of critters too. Here's another giant spider. Little did I know that Goliath was going to make this one look tame.


Travis has giant hands, and here's a comparison of what his big thumb looks like on the pick compared to the spider! (but again, Goliath was way bigger)


Under the retaining wall bricks were a lot of snails and slugs, so I guess we'll never technically be free of those, but no one's going to poke around down there anyway, so the used part of the yard is free of them just as it was before we uprooted them.










After finding two snails, the boys set them up for a race. One definitely seemed scared of the other and just hunkered down while the other took off


Finally the scared one followed the first


There they are watching the snail race while Daddy works


When I took pictures of the trench I noticed this ugly spider on the fence. I have never seen one like this before! His body reminds me of a potato. Which means he's not a spider. He's a daddy-longlegs since he has only one body section instead of two. Still. Ugly.


There was also this bee that looked like he was eating something on the fence post. His head was sort of bobbing up and down and he kept coming back to the plank.


I had my wide angle lens on for the potato daddy-longlegs and the bee, so the scary part was how close I got the lens to them just to get an "up close" picture. Still, these pictures are really cropped in.

I thought the bee's shadow in flight was kind of cool.


And that's it. See, not as bad as Goliath and no more critters for awhile now, I promise. And no more BBP posts.

The End

BBP Part 6 Grass And A Sump Pump

Don't miss
BBP Part 1 Arbor Vitae And Rocks
BBP Part 2 Straightening The Wall
BBP Part 3 Goliath And His Friends
BBP Part 4 Sod And More 
BBP Part 5 Finally A Fence

Sept. 14th A week after seeding, the grass is starting to come up!


We went to Reno from the 16th to the 19th and came home to green!


The lighter green is not just because it's new grass, it's the faster growing annual grass that is in the mix. Eventually the slower growing perennial grasses will come in in the darker green and blend in. Theoretically.


Unfortunately, Travis didn't turn the sprinklers off while we were in Reno and apparently it dumped buckets and buckets of rain. The sod we bought popped up everywhere with these.


And these.


And these.


It's not that we got faulty sod, it's just a moisture control issue. Still. Annoying.

While on the subject of water, it's a problem under our house. Considering there's a creek in our backyard and a serious hill behind the neighbors across the street, obviously we're in a watershed. When we had the house inspected we found out about the water problem. Apparently pretty much everyone on the street has the same problem and didn't know about it until we got our inspection. That stinks of an engineering problem in the development to me.

Originally Travis talked about digging a perimeter trench around under the house, and putting in a sump pump. He hoped it would dry up down there during the summer so he could dig it out. Not so. It didn't seem to dry up at all. So, now what?

He decided to try digging down below the foundation and setting up a sump pump outside. He put his test in where the ugly concrete pad had been. Eventually he wants a shed back there, so this was just a test to see if it would work before he went full force where it needed to go.

Looks like it's collecting water to me.


Here he is Friday Sept. 24th getting ready to go down and see how the test has performed over some time and see if the water level under the house had gone down.


He said crawling around on the black plastic used to be like a water bed. Not anymore! It was definitely  working!


Here was the temporary drain. Now that we knew it worked, he planned to thread the pipe up his curtain drain. You can also get a glimpse of the finished fence with the little gate in it.


Pumping water out!


The new home for the sump pump was just on the other side of the air conditioner from the test (because a shed will go on the other side) but the new spot had leftover concrete dumped there from when the house was built. Time to hammer it out!


And here's the new sump pump. Travis hasn't made a locking lid yet for the box, but it's not like the kids are outside in all the rain right now anyway. The sump is made of two garbage cans stacked on top of each other one smaller (on the bottom) and a larger one with the bottom cut out stacked on the top. Then he drilled lots of holes in the sides for the water to come through.


Here you can see down the sump and see that it is collecting water. The ring you see at the water line is about half way down and is to keep the sump from collapsing with the pressure of the dirt around it. It came from an old truck wheel. Travis cut the bead off of the wheel and hammered it in until friction held it tight.


So then the backyard was done, the water under the house was taken care of and all in time for the rainy season. I'm looking forward to enjoying my bigger, leveler, slug-free, snake-free and (compared to what it was) spider-free, and an all around better backyard next summer! Hope you enjoyed reading all about our BBP!