Farewell

I Love the month of May.  It's my absolute favorite, with October second.  I am sad to see it go.

Here are some of the May things we caught on camera.

Sofie and I want a kitty.  But it doesn't look like we've convinced the rest of the household.  :)

Until then, Sofie can drag her stuffed kitty around with a shoelace tied around it's neck.

I turned 28!  Most of the things I did for my birthday didn't get caught on camera, but this one did.  I went to lunch with my sister and mom at Rumbi Island Grill.  Yum!

Us.

Yarg!

Mei Mei

Sofie hid my present and had these foot prints leading to it.  (Inspired by the leprechaun that visited her earlier this year.)

Last May I snatched this old, beat up picnic table from my Grandma's house.  We made a few repairs, sanded it down and this month I finally painted it!

I wanted it to scream SUMMER!  I did good!

(the baby tree in the background was one of my birthday presents...I'm afraid it might be dead already!  I am sooooo sad!)

The garden!

Of course, you can't see the seeds/baby plants so well, but there's lots in there!

Zucchini, strawberries, tomatoes, 4 varieties of peppers, pumpkin, sweet meat squash, peas, onions, beets, spinach, lettuce.  (and raspberries to the right)  This year we are growing the tomatoes, pumpkin, and sweet meat vertically.  I stuck a chain link fence in the back (hard to see, it's to the left of the lattice for the peas) for the squash and pumpkins.  Hopefully it works and I can have a great picture of the climbing pumpkins this fall!!  The tomatoes will climb the 3 stakes on the left.

We got a trampoline!!  I think I was more excited than anybody to get this!  I love trampolines!

The Basement Fun!

Still working hard on the basement these days!  This was a while back when we were sanding.  Yuck.

 We've had a few little helpers.  Cute little Makai helping the daddy's sand.

Don came to the rescue with his texture gun!

I caught him on camera "dancing" but I'll save that for family only :)

 Painting has been the most exciting step so far!  Derek and I had to gate the kids out all weekend while we painted.  The children didn't so much like that.  But we got it all DONE!!  I won't show anymore after pictures until it actually looks nice, with furniture and stuff.

We eventually let Sofie in to help.  She painted inside of the closet, a nice safe spot.  Although somehow she managed to get some on her lips...

Can't wait until it's all done and I have a fully functioning laundry room, a bedroom, and another bathroom (it will make potty training so nice when we're downstairs!)  Mostly I can't wait until we can clean up all this construction mess!!!

Some More Green Thumbing

I don't have a good "before" pictures of my trees, because they sucked.  They didn't grow any visible leaves until June.  All summer they would drop leaves and looks sad.  Then in the fall they'd curl up, turn brown and die.  They didn't even drop their leaves.  HIDEOUS!!  And they weren't growing either.  So, I grabbed the hand saw and played lumber jack for a while.  Even got to wield the axe!  (Those would've been great pictures!!  Too bad I was alone.)

 Sofie and Meili with the Japanese Katsura.  This thing is rad.  In the spring it has reddish (fall looking) leaves.  It's green in the summer.  Then turns an apricot color in the fall.  It has heart shaped leaves, flutters like an Aspen, and get this, smells like caramel in the fall!  Can't wait!

Meili's favorite food at this point in life is dirt.  The more gooey the better.  Chunks of gravel in it?  No problem!

My neighbors, who happen to be my aunt and uncle, came to my rescue when I hit the hard pan layer under the last sick trees.  Now that's out of the way and filled with nice soil, these trees should grow much better!

Itty bitty stumps.

Axes are safe for babies, right?

REPLACED!!  This tree is a Ruby Horse Chestnut.  Derek's grandma has one and I'm in love with it.  It grows huge leaves and giant flower clusters that bloom in May after all the other blossoms are gone.  (My leaves and flowers are the baby version of course.)

So excited to see this tree grow!  

Now that I've planted a few dream plants/trees we're not allowed to move :)

The Katsura planted.

(no worries, it'll look a little thicker soon)

The Ruby Horse Chestnut

We've already lost a few branches to the wind here in Lehi :(

(behind the tree you can see the lilac and snowball I'm moving in order to plant my rose of sharon.  Can't wait for those flowers!!)

And a random Easter picture that never got posted.  It was such a beautiful day!

I DID IT!!

Really this should be titled "WE did it" because my sister has spent hours and hours helping me dig, load, haul, unload, carry, weed, watch kids, etc.   But it was my idea :)  When we moved in there was only one plant in the backyard, a fairly large backyard.  It's a lilac bush and it's planted in a really awkward spot, but it's beautiful.  Anyway, I love grass, and I love simple, but this backyard needed a little bit of spice.  It looks so much better, but I'll have to take another picture when my baby plants are full and beautiful!  

All the rocks were free, big ones were my neighbors, little ones were my sisters!  Some of the plants were free, thanks to my aunt Deena and her beautiful backyard!

Before

After

 Before

After

Before

 After

Now I just wish this section of the backyard was visible from the patio...

It's only been a month...

LOADS of Easter pictures!  :)

The reason it took me this long to post is because my grandma took some really cute ones and I waiting to get copies, but I don't want to wait any longer!  When I get those, I'll post them.

 Porcaro Easter Party!  

Lots of candy, more candy, and cousins!

 These stinky toes LOVE grandpa!

 Story time with Grandpa A. and Great Grandpa P.

Adorable.

 Nothing is cuter than these three cousins together!

Sienna, Sofie, and Sierra

 Hunting for eggs

 Meili was more excited than I expected!

 Thanks Grandpa for helping get the hard ones!

 Me and m'girls

 Meili discovered jelly beans this day... enough said.

 Uncovering the spoils with Daddy.

 This was the best Easter weather I can remember!

 Pretty sure we all got sunburned.  So worth it!

 Dying eggs for the Easter Bunny

 Another year that the Easter bunny didn't fail.

 Sofie managed to stuff an entire peep in her mouth!

Gave me the shivers.

 Mei was more excited about the little eggs.  They're still a great toy in our Sunday bag.

 I failed to get a picture of Mei in her Easter outfit the day of, so this was the next week in St. George. 

Still too difficult to get a good picture of this kid, she is ALWAYS moving!!

Before and After

We bought our home a year and a half ago as a repo and the yard has been a project.  Apparently nobody really took care of the yard before.  Now that Meimei is old enough to play outside while I work, I have finally made some slow progress.

The last few people who owned the home didn't know how to take care of grass...  This is actually better than it looked last year!  (that patio is another project)

 Derek spent the entire summer last year fixing our sprinklers so this year I could finally plant grass!  This is the mix I used that looks like green snow.  In a month I'll post pictures of my new beautiful lawn! :)

I hated this section of the yard.  But I couldn't put a flower bed here because of the sprinkler positioning.  So I had to be clever.

 It is now my new (soon to be) herb and flower garden, completely moveable if there are problems with sprinklers.

The old shutters were a nasty faded green color that really dated the house, kind of hard to tell in the picture.

I painted them black.  It's a bad comparison picture though because the earlier one was summer, beautiful weather and flowers.  Maybe I should've waited 'til the flowers bloom and the sun shines to take this picture!

(next we need to fix the roof...)

This is an island flower bed in the front yard.  I don't have a before picture but when we moved in it didn't have anything in it but crappy grass and weeds.  We cleaned it out, covered it with black garden fabric, dumped some bark and got to work planting stuff.  Right now I've got tulips and phlox.  In the summer I'll have snap dragons, fox glove, dianthus and a burning bush.  So much better!

I've  been working on a few other projects but don't have "after" pictures yet.  Maybe next week or so.  We have two sickly trees in the front yard that don't get leaves until mid summer, and then just shrivel up and die in the fall instead of changing color.  They're still young though, so I'll be replacing them with (hopefully) a Ruby Horse Chestnut and a Katsura tree.

For Roo

I wanted to post another video of Mei going totally nuts and wandering around like a lunatic, but the video was barely too long to upload. :( But she's so darling.