Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah!: First Post!

Hey there Mom and Dad! (and jackie and jonathan and sam)

So Jackie and I decided it would be good to start posting up stuff thats going on in our lives, to help our little family stay better connected.
So I'll just put up a few things every weekend to show you what all we've been up to over here in LA.

This first thing you've probably all seen - but it was our first big project we did in our yard!

Before:

After!

Still not fully finished but its on its way :)

This is what our yard's ground looked like when we first got here:

Hard packed, dusty, dry and not very nice to look at.
So we decided to do something about it. We opted for planting seed instead of sod (based on your advice!). So in order to plant grass seed, we'd need to dig up that hard-packed soil and mix in some good bagged soil with it. We decided we'd dig about 6 inches down into the soil.

Me wielding my weapon of choice:

During excavation:

We were too gung-ho and ended up digging a foot instead of 6 inches!

Piles of dirt. (Some of it got into the house...)

After we were done digging, we filled the giant pit we had created up with dirt and mixed it in with good soil. It was such a rewarding experience!

Ahhh... smooth lawn.

After that we added in (temporarily) the pavers for the patio area. Now to wait for the seeds to start sprouting!

So about 2 weeks later the grass looked about like this:

We also put in the pavers properly, with 10 bags of leveling sand. When we had those down, the easiest part was filling all the remaining spaces with mulch. The mulch is rubber, so when you step on it, its really fun and squishy, and there's no danger of getting splinters in your toes!

Here we are testing out the patio area with the neighbor's patio furniture :P

Too perfect!

Friday night, Nelson bought a fun strategy board game called Pandemic. We played it outside on the patio and hung up some lights, with a glass of wine, of course. :)