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.

Halloween fun

The boys had a fun Halloween this year. In the spirit of buying our new home and fixing it up all the time, we were a construction crew family. Mario and I used similar outfits when we went to his company's Halloween party. Our neighborhood has a block party in our cul de sac where parents hang out and several homes (I think it was about 9) brought bowls of candy for the kids to hit a bunch of places at once. They appearantly upped things a bit this year and added several blow up things included a haunted house thing. MJ wasn't so into the scary stuff but it was impressive. Some of the adults dressed up, so we did too (not that it was too difficult to throw that stuff on). It was nice getting to meet more of them.MJ was totally excited about trick or treating. Joey liked it well enough, but wanted to eat the candy as soon as he got it. Also noteworthy was the suprise that our parish priest answered the door once. I actually knew the rectory was down the street in our neighborhood, but kind of forgot about it until then. And yes, they gave out good candy. :-)

Joey was not very cooperative with his hat or belt, but I wanted to try to get another picture of them. Actually, he wouldn't hold still, but seems to like the flashing light of the self-timer, so I set it up on a chair and moved over to the side... yep, MJ is smiling at me and not the camera.