Moving past the pain

Mario and I decided to drown ourselves in work last night so at least one good thing would have come from it. We painted the kitchen windows (finally), and all the trim and ceiling in his office. Hopefully, we'll have the walls and everything else done tonight. In more of an effort to remind ourselves of happy times, I searched through recent pictures and thought I'd share them with you.

As you know, our tree fell down a couple of weeks ago. Here are the before and after pictures... we had 4 trees from the front removed (2 overgrown arborvitaes, the Bradford Pear, and an illgrowing Magnolia that was in the wrong place) and 2 volunteer Mulberry trees in the back. (I'll have to get pictures of those later). We have moved a dogwood from our backyard to the front, and a lot of the neighbors have already complimented the new look.


I'll have to get a better after picture, but the dogwood is pretty much where the shovel is.


It was quite heavy... I only helped lift a little. Mario really did all the work on this tree transplant. I stomped the dirt down to get rid of air pockets, but because we also watered it (to help remove the air) I was really stuck in some yucky mud. It felt like a messier version of squashing grapes into wine.


The boys are really enjoying helping out in the yard. We used this mulch from our tree removal to mulch the path in the woods to our church as well as some other trees in the yard.



We (well, I should say Mario) realized the not-fun parts about living on a large property with lots of trees...there are many leaves. He didn't really get all of them, but was making an effort so our baby grass would grow better (which it is looking very nice).

Joey is an interesting kid. We think he was trying to be a football player.