3 outta 4 Ain't Bad

Boy did we work hard on my first Mother's Day. But it was a gorgeous day and I wouldn't have it any other way. In fact we even had a few hours of Carter free working thanks to some generous babysitting from our across the street neighbors. After the yummy breakfast we headed off to Lowe's. On Saturday we had calculated out how many landscape timbers and nails we needed to form our garden beds. As we were loading the 20th or so timber onto the cart we started having second thoughts (really ninth thoughts - we can really overthink things sometimes (most of the time)). We wondered if we might be attracting termites to our yard (last week there were some termites flying around an old stump across the street). We wondered if we would have to replace these next year. Plus, the timbers at Lowe's were looking pretty rough. So, we unloaded the 20 or so timbers and headed for the cedar aisle. (Thankfully only one timber fell on my foot during this process.) The original plan was to do 3 six-foot boxes and one long box in the back. The cedar boards came in 10 foot lengths so we quickly changed our plans to 3 five foot square boxes and 1 twenty by 3 foot box in the back which made for simple measuring, easy cutting, and less waste. We rented a truck from Lowe's for an hour, brought everything home, and got right to work.

At this point it was past Carter's first morning nap so I put him to bed hoping he would get an extra long nap so we could work longer. No such luck. The little man woke up exactly 1 1/2 hours later - just like clock work. Thankfully we had run into our neighbors across the street and they offered to babysit for an hour or so if we were interested. I agreed (probably a little too quickly - especially on Mother's Day!) and after a quick lunch packed a diaper bag of supplies and sent Carter off with some of his favorite neighbors. They took Carter for a stroll just down the road to the retirement home where Nelson's mother lives. Apparently Carter was all smiles and made plenty of others smile too. I think everyone had a great time. And we completed 3 of the 4 boxes.

Thankfully some other neighbors lent us a carpenter square and level so we could make the squares actually square...well, almost square. By the end of the day we were beat. And so was Carter. He went right to sleep which gave us a chance to grill outside and enjoy a nice dinner under our pergola. All in all it was a fabulous day and I feel pretty blessed to have such a precious baby boy and a super thoughtful husband who is pretty good with power tools too.

Check out the almost finished product. We are going to fill in the pathways with mulch and then paving stones. Eventually we are going to plant sedum (kind of like this)around the paving stones. I hope to get some planting done this week...

Carter came out before his bed time to approve our work. Only a matter of time before he is running along those pathways (and hopefully eating lots of our produce! By the way, thanks for all of the comments with recommendations for introducing new foods. We are trying them all and are making some progress. Yay!)