When we looked at the house two years (!) ago, we had a lovely backyard, vaguely reminicent of an English Garden.  Flagstones everywhere, two-tier fountain area, stone lined flower beds, high bushes and shubbery, etc.  When we moved in, the backyard had gone a little bit to seed, but still manageable.  Of course, I am no gardener and my wife was hardly in any shape to help out, given how young our daughter was at that point.

So…the garden slipped a little more.

And then our daughter started walking and talking and basically becoming a child rather than an infant.   Our lovely garden in disrepeair transformed from a tranquil space to sit while waiting for the grill to heat up to being an instant death-trap for a toddler.  Every loose stone was eyed as a potential killer, every pebble became a choking hazard.

It all had to go.  The fountain, the stones, everything.  We would put down grass, we would install play equipment.  We would turn our backyard into a playpen, as every parent apparently does.

I had made a few fleeting attempts to get started.   I took down a whole layer of the fountain myself last fall.  But lacking the whip, I was a smidge lazy.

This past week my wife turned to me and said, “We’re sending the kid to stay with Nanna and Poppop this weekend and we are going to Do This Backyard.

And so we got started in earnest.

The picture at the beginning of the post is a shot of some of the stones we’ve been piling up.  It was taken with an apeture of f/5.6  with an ISO of 400 and a 1/400 exposure time.

The picture shown to the right is a shot of Micah taken when we came up to pick her up.

She’d been playing at the park, and was non-too pleased to go home.

She slept like a log all the way home, however.

Go figure.

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