A little bit of us.

Snack time...you would think I might go with the "Pottery Barn" staged clean house look for one of the first new home pictures. Sigh. I don't think so. Either my house is never tidy or I think about taking pictures at all the wrong times. But the truth is, abundant life and Pottery Barn could never exist in the same catalog. ;)

In progress. I still haven't quite figured out my plant arrangement yet. These are all transplants from an area that we need for the garden. The only thing I bought (well I guess I'm buying it all, sheesh!) is the sand.
The yard came well landscaped, so now I just have to spend time and energy (fat) to make it what I want. Win, win, win.

With butterfly face paint remnants around her eyes. She looked like someone hit her for 3 days after.

Brilliant little healthy man. He rejected "Beans and Franks" for "Carrot-n-Bun". I don't think that carrots in buns is ever going to catch on as a lunch time favorite. He only got through 3 bites.

I had an enormously pleasurable little video clip of her shucking the corn. Sadly it was not small enough to post. The play by play is really not going to be entertaining but it goes something like this. Sophia gets the corn, shucks the corn with some cute commentary, asks for help but finishes well, and eats the corn...because after all the hard work there needs to be instant reward, no waiting around for the pot to boil.

This is what we have all been waiting for...well at least for the past two and a half months.

The image of a homestead. Not the one we had imagined but a lovely start to what could become and "urban" homestead. We feel blessed. So many discoveries to make. We have discovered fruit trees, edible viney things, mice (that are now at the landfill), leaking, flooding, and how much fun it is to invest in something according to your purposes. For the first time since I left Florida I have been able to look at my yard and move everything around.

We are able to walk to several places. Most importantly Nick is walking to work and home for lunch, and maybe little people to school in a few weeks.

So sweet isn't it?

This is how it looked as we were getting everything moved in. That is our apple tree. Up and behind the apple is a wild purple plum (good for jam if the birds don't eat them all first). There is also a peach, and I recently discovered what looks like Muscadines. We also have good foraging type plants. Wild strawberries, wild onions, garlic, and dandelions.

This is how it looks now. Nick is creating two terraces for our vegetables so I am moving plants .

Nicks first terrace wall. He asked some guys down the street who were busting p concrete if they would deliver it to our house. We will have plenty more because we have gotten notice from the city that we need to replace the sidewalk in front of our house as well. The spoonful of sugar is that I will have plenty of material for more walls and walkways, borders and such.

This used to be an all brick walkway. They had some strange landscaping bed with decomposing mulch right in front of the garage door. We thought it was silly (plus it was the reason the garage was flooding). The whole area ended up having this ugly concrete under the superfluous bricks. So now we have a walkway that isn't silly; just a little ugly. But my Herb bed is nice.