OK, actually we had green fuzzies a few weeks ago.  Now it’s actually starting to look like grass.  We hydroseeded and when you do that you get a lot of weeds for the first year or so, plus some bare spots that need filling in.  But we’ve heard nothing but positives in the long run from others who hydroseeded.  So that plus the fact that when doing a 1-acre yard it saves about $8000 compared to sodding an acre, means it’s worth it.  The big summer projects we’ve done in addition to the grass this year are:

• Fence: We put in Trex fencing which is beautiful and virtually maintenance free for 25 years.  Plus it gives us the wood look that looks so much better with our house than vinyl would.
• Concrete work: We poured a big basketball pad on the west and a back patio out of the basement and steps going down the east side to the new patio.
• Trampoline pit: Keep the kiddies safe.  I did this one with just cinderblock, some chain-link fence posts, and a lot of dirt to fill in the cinderblock holes.

So FINALLY, 3 years after moving in, things are starting to come together in our yard.  Here’s some photos showing the current status:

front yard weeds (and grass – honestly it’s there!)	see, there really is grass!
front yard with the new fence	back yard with the new fence on the right side and the new trampoline pit
basketball pad right after completion before the fence was put in	back patio as it was getting completed.  Soon this will be covered by a deck.

OK, so I have been absolutely slammed at work the last few weeks, working on a bunch of projects which include in no particular order:

• Sally Hansen Natural Beauty (a cosmetics company back east — woohoo!)
• GM
• Purina Mighty Dog
• American Airlines
• Microsoft Dynamics accounting software
• Liberty Fillmore, Cart Whisperer phases II AND III for VeriSign

I’m trying to get all that done so I can take a week and a half off starting Thursday when both Julie’s and my family have tons going on including Katie and Tagg getting married. So with all that, I haven’t had a chance to write but I do now as I sit on the train on the way to work. The new FrontRunner train is very nice. I can sit at a table, plug in my laptop and have wireless connectivity so I can work — or blog. So anyway, there’s a bunch of updates. The biggest is that we’re FINALLY getting our yard done!

The kids enjoying the tramp pit settling

The kids watching the basketball pad construction

Three weeks ago we got the trampoline pit completed. I laid a bed of gravel, leveled it out pretty well, then laid 128 cinder blocks in a ring 3 feet high and 13 feet wide. To get things settled I filled the pit with water and walked around on the blocks a bunch, to push the blocks and gravel into the nice muddy ground. The boys especially loved that part. We got all our concrete done 2 weeks ago – the back patio, side basketball court, and steps going down the east side of our house from the driveway to the back patio.

The new back patio

Last week the fence got started. All the posts are in and the concrete had to cure for about a week. But today they got started putting up the actual fence. We went to Julie’s Uncle Kimo’s house on Sunday and they had just redone their yard. They had done the Trex fence in exact same color and style as we’re doing so it was nice to see it “in vivo” so to speak instead of just in pictures. I LOVED it and can’t wait until ours is done. It should be done by tomorrow. Once that’s done, we’ll hydroseed! Then we have to stay off the yard for about 6 weeks, but it will be SO NICE to have that done.

Other random updates:

Logan must have been REALLY tired right after his bath a couple weeks ago. I snapped these pictures so you could see it from my point of view as I walked into the bathroom:

The twins are doing great. They’re both sitting up on their own, and rolling over a little bit. Roman LOVES to play with his feet:

And Maren LOVES to play with Roman:

And the other kids are having fun with summer break here. The other day, the boys decided to play prisoner with Eden, 2 laundry baskets and 3 soccer socks:

We finished the sod on the east side of our driveway a couple weeks ago, so I wanted to show y’all how it looks. It was quite exciting seeing that bit get in. Many thanks to Kent, Jill, Josh, Jodi, and Christian for their help! The real good thing now is that we’ve basically got our main yard surrounded, with grass on the east and on the north and west parkways and our neighbors’ grass along the rear. Ha ha! We’ve got you now, yard! Of course, there’s still close to an acre that’s covered in thorny bush. That stuff is so nasty! Anyway, now that it’s surrounded we’re hoping the grass will just move in on the thorns. Yeah right. Well, anyway, hopefully we’ll get the rest seeded within a few weeks.

Julie’s up at girls’ camp for the Young Women this week, so we’ve been juggling our kids back and forth between her parents, my sisters, and me. Well, yesterday, I returned home from picking up the kids after work and had a few messages from a lady in our ward wondering if we wanted any sod because a friend of theirs had a couple extra pallettes and was just going to throw it away. Do we want sod??? Are you kidding? It had been awhile since the last message she had left, so I frantically called her back hoping that the friend had not thrown the sod away. Turns out they just assumed we wanted it (like I said, a very safe assumption), and her husband had borrowed a company truck with a pallette jack and gone to West Jordan to pick it up and bring it back to us and he would be back up here by 7:30 or so. WOW! So cool.

So I ran out to get going and my home teacher was outside, hard at work filling in sprinkler holes. What a man! I told him the story and we hurried to prep the parkways for the coming sod. Julie’s parents had got the parkways all cleaned out of weeds and junk so it was just a matter of pulling out some dirt and leveling things for the most part. The sod showed up and as the truck came pulling up to the curb, about 10 of the youth in the ward from age 12 to 17 came walking up the street, ready to help. I passed out shovels, rakes, and gloves and some continued the parkway prep and others started laying sod. Well, that is after we had quite an adventure getting the sod down off the truck. It had a hydraulic lift and we thought it would be pretty easy, but I ended up laying into the pallette like a blocking sled to keep it level and on the hydraulic lift.

After about 20 minutes of sodding, another friend in the ward showed up to help pass out drinks and do whatever she could. That was a huge help because about this time, Logan needed help inside, Peyton and Soren were hungry, and Eden was about ready for bed. So she took over in the house and made sure the kids were taken care of and eventually put to bed, so I could stay outside and work.

It was now starting to get dark, so I pulled out the construction floodlights and turned them on the parkways. We finally got all the sod laid and the mess all cleaned up around 10:00 pm. We got all the front parkway and about half of the side parkway done with the 2 pallettes. It was awesome! Even though it was just parkways, IT WAS GRASS!!!! I haven’t taken pics yet, because Julie’s got our camera, but as soon as she’s back we’ll post some up here. I can’t wait for Julie to get home. She is completely out of cell range at Aspen Ridge so I haven’t talked to her. But I wouldn’t tell her, even if I had. She’ll be so excited for that surprise awaiting her. I’ll just tell her I had it planned all along!

Last week, Julie was sitting home, enjoying a bit of peace and rest while the kids were quietly playing on their own.  It doesn’t happen very often, so it’s a big deal!  Then the doorbell rang and Julie opened the door to find a Layton city cop.  Now, some of you will remember that Julie has never done well around cops.  Once she got pulled over for driving too slow.  The cop just wanted to encourage her to speed up a bit but he ended up having to console a bawling teenager who apparently thought going slow must be a prisonable offense.  So the presence of the policeman, combined with raging pregnancy hormones was not a good mix and Julie almost immediately was in tears.  The policeman informed her that someone had complained about our yard, that we were in violation of city ordinances with the weeds in our yard, and that we had 2 weeks to get things cleared up or we would receive a citation.  He was actually very nice about it.  But I was ticked off.  That lot where our house sits has been uninhabited for 25 years before we built our house, totally overgrown with weeds every single one of those years.  And now when it is TOTALLY OBVIOUS that we are putting in our sprinklers and getting ready for grass and actually trying to make it a nice yard, we get complaints.  So I called the officer and he was pretty understanding.  I told him that we had to fight with Layton city for 2 YEARS to get the irrigation water that we had paid for and that the previous owner of the land had paid for every year and that was supposed to be part of our property actually put in and that there was NO WAY I was going to pay $400 or more a month to water an acre with culinary water when I’m paying for irrigation rights every year.  Yes, there is an ordinance that says that your front yard has to be in 18 months after you move into the house.  But that also implies that the basic utilities to be able to get that done and which we’ve been paying for, have actually been put in.  Well, he agreed and said that as long as we’re working on actually improving it, that’s what matters.  I just wish I could tell that to whoever complained.  I asked who did and he said it was an anonymous complaint.  So Mr. Anonymous Busybody Neighbor, I just have this to say:

“Believe me, NO ONE wants this yard completed more than WE do.  Do you think we like having the ugliest yard in the neighborhood?  Do you think I like telling my kids they can’t go out and play or that they have to go to the park to play because of all the dirt, mud, weeds, and sticker bushes that are all over our yard?  Maybe if you were as observant of the people in my yard as you were about the yard itself, you would notice that we have been working on that yard, on getting the sprinklers in, on getting the weeds taken care of so we can put in grass.  We’ve had friends and family come help us.  It’s a big job.  It sat untended for 25 years while you and the rest of our neighbors used it as a dumping ground, or a golf driving range (we have found a ton of golf balls as we’ve been doing this sprinkler system) or a hot-air balloon launching pad (seriously, a neighbor ran their hot air balloon ride business from our property at one point), or a scenic view spot (even now with our house built, we still have people just wander right into our backyard to look at the view, like there’s not a house there – really weird), or a “political/garage sale/open house sign” place.  I’d like to get it done too.  And soon it will be and we’ll have a nice big yard that we can invite the whole neighborhood over to for a barbecue.  I only wish I knew who you were so I could UN-invite you.  Next time, be a man, come talk to me if you have a problem with my yard or my kids or whatever and I’ll be more than happy to explain what’s happening so we can resolve it like good neighbors.”

OK, done venting.   And here’s some pics of the latest work we’ve been doing on our yard: