It's not a green thumb... it's a green pinkie

If anyone remembers, last year I spent a lot of time working on these flower beds out by the pool. When we had the patio designed, we purposely had them make 2 empty spaces, one on either side of the pool, in the cement to give us a place for landscaping and flowers. Last year the flowers looked great, but I had decided to do rock in the beds, instead of mulch, for fear that the mulch would fly into the pool with too much wind. However, something worse happened, which did not depend on the weather - Ava developed a bad habit of amusing herself while throwing the rocks into the pool. This did not make either of us happy, so finally I decided the beds needed a complete overhaul.

I should have started taking pictures from the very beginning, to document what I was starting with. But let me just tell you... it was a mess, and a lot of work. This "before" picture was actually after several long hours of pulling out dead foliage from last year, and scooping several wagon loads of rock, along with some dirt, out of the beds. Aagghh... I think my back is still recovering.


So new dirt was laid, new plants were planted, new mulch was... well, mulched. And here you have it... the finished product. And with all the rain we have had lately (thank you, Midwestern flooding for sparing us more than our fair share) they have really spread out more than in these pictures and look really good.



And the best part is... Ava hasn't bothered to touch the mulch one bit. And none of it has ended up in the pool yet. The cutest thing is Ava likes to "pick flowers for Mommy" and brings me snippets of leaves and a few blooms inside the house and lays them in my hands. So cute!

The new house

As some of you already know, we were lucky enough to move into our brand new home this April. It was quite an interesting process to build a home from the very beginning, and it was exciting to pick out all of the details that make it more personal to us.

Packing up and saying goodbye to the house we had called home for several years was hard. Luckily Ava was still too young to realize what we were leaving behind, but for me and Chris, there were many memories revisiting us as we packed up boxes and shut the doors for the last time. But we know our future is in this new home, and we intend to be here for quite a while!

The best part about our new home came a few weeks after we moved in - Our new pool was completed! Chris and I joke that we now feel like we are on vacation every day, because it is so relaxing to be outside and take a swim whenever we feel like it. Ava *loves* the pool and has become quite a little fish in

the short time we have lived here. She now doesn't let us sit on the side and watch anymore, she prompts us with "Jump! Jump??" because she loves jumping off the edge into our arms and making a big splash.