Week in Review..

This week at daycare we did play dough and played at the park! It was such beautiful weather, not too cold and just right:) It felt wonderful being able to get out of the house during the day! I also started watching a little 3 month old baby boy a few weeks ago and so I get lots of snuggling time:)

Abby's favorite thing to do at the park is to play in the sand, she loves to just scoop sand with a shovel into a bucket.

We have embarked on a major project for the backyard. We have a sloping hill in the backyard that takes up about 6-8 feet of our backyard. Our backyard is pretty small so we've always dreamed about cutting back the hill, putting in a retaining wall and leveling out the ground so that we have more usable space. That way we can use the dirt behind the retaining wall as a garden, and use the rest of the backyard for fun stuff and room to play. So, I've started digging back the hill. It's quite the process and we have ended up with a lot of dirt! We have been advised to keep most of the dirt because we will need to back fill once our wall is up....but the problem is that we are running out of room to store all of the dirt. This is an example of the retaining wall that we are going to build...the bottom of the pic used to be part of the hill...that's how far I've had to dig! We are digging away about 4-5 feet of hill! These pics were taken on Monday....

Our ever growing mound of dirt...

These pics were taken this morning after yesterdays work...On this side of the yard we are digging up the grass because we wanted to put a fire pit in over here where we can all sit around it, but then yesterday Rick was saying that it would be perfect to put the pool in the summer because then it wouldn't kill our grass. So we may still be figuring things out....

It's hard to tell from the shade, but we were able to cut back the hill quite a lot this week. We made lots of progress. Rick calls me a workhorse, I just find it stress relieving to work out in the yard. It's hard work and it just makes me happy to be working on a project. 

Our still growing dirt mound...

I'll try and take more pics when it's more sunshiny in the back yard and then you can get a better idea. We are excited to see some positive changes in the backyard, it may be awhile before we can put up the retaining wall just because of how expensive the blocks are....I'm scanning craigslist for free blocks everyday but haven't found any yet. As long as we can get it dug out and ready though, I will be happy:)

Week in Review...

This week was busy! We started off the week with having Monday off, so the kids and I headed over to their favorite Riverview park with some friends. It was a fun morning...

Meanwhile back at home we had some workers come over to put in a pathway and rock. We had spent about 2 weeks pulling out these big bushes out in front of our house, all of the curbing and all of the grass. The cactus directly in front of our front door came out about 6 months ago, I believe....so this is a before shot...

We loved the big bushes because they would shade the front window in the summer, but I didn't like the way that it blocked our house so much. So I ripped them out:)

And then this is after...I built a new garden bed under the big front window and planted some flowers there and we also planted an aloe pant, an ice plant and a native Arizona flowering plant. Hopefully we can keep them alive, everyone loves the new pathway!

It's hard to see the pathway because it blends right in with the rock, which is pretty cool. You can see it close up, we also got new solar shades for our front windows so that I don't have to worry about the sun in the summer. Plus I can spy on my neighbors all day long and they will never know that I'm spying on them!! hahaha!! For real though:) haha!

Here are some other family shots from our family picture session back in December...
Rick's sister Becca, husband Charles and Clark and baby #2...

Mike and Rick's sister Kristy...

Rick's brother Rob and his wife Jenny...

Kristy's family...

Rob's family...

Week in Review...

Last week we had Activity days at our house and the girls made these cute Resolution banners, where they wrote their resolutions for the year on them. It was cute how they each were so different from each others banners. Ashlyn had her first orchestra concert, and they did such a good job! I was amazed at how good they sounded, no squeaks! She is learning the violin and when she practices at home, even Haley is amazed at how good a tone Ashlyn is able to play. We are excited to see her grow with this talent! Her teacher came to her concert and gave each of her students a rose! That was so sweet!

About 3 weeks ago a very good friend of mine went into labor early and had a 3 lb 1 oz baby boy! You can imagine that this brought back a lot of memories for me! I wanted to send her pictures of Jacob so that she could have hope and realize how far we have come since having a 3 lb 6 oz baby boy 8 years ago. I looked everywhere, I went through all of our photos that have been printed, and digital, I went through my blog and only found 3-4 pictures! I was devastated thinking that I had lost all of those photos! Finally I decided that I had to have saved them and went back through my emails and found that all of our NICU pictures were shared through kodak gallery, which has since been bought by Shutterfly and if you didn't link your account back in 2012 then they were gone forever!! I was so upset! Well, I was still determined to find them so I got out all of our CD's and started putting them into our CD drive on our computer and each one came up blank! So upsetting! So, I started sending Rick to work with a couple of CD's to check everyday. On the 2nd day, he found them!! So, I'm putting them on the blog so I can print them out in my blog book and we are going to save them!!  Here is our NICU adventure with little Jacob, I think there are more pics out there, so I'll keep looking!

Rick's mom came to stay with us for a few weeks which was a huge blessing! I had to drive down to Provo a couple of times a day and spend hours each time. It was definitely a very stressful time, but we survived and can't believe how far he has come!

I think this was the first time that I got to see Jacob with Haley and Rick...Ashlyn wasn't allowed into the NICU.

Dad Hahn and Carrie came to help out and see baby Jacob...

 Dad, Haley and Jacob..

 Haley holding Jacob...

Rick's sister Becca was a big help as well...

This pic was when Jacob came home and he had the oxygen monitor on.