Music, mulch and moles

It has been a busy week. Tyler had his first Kindermusik class last Tuesday. I think he liked it, but mostly he just liked having lots of new toys and friends to play with. He didn't seem to understand what was going on at all. Hopefully with repitition, it will come. The funniest part to me was when we were playing pretend with the kitchen. I "filled up" a cup from the little plastic faucet and gave it to him, saying "water", and he got that idea. "Wa-tay." But then he tried to drink out of it and figured out it was empty. He gave me this look that was just classic. (Um, it's empty mom! Geez, what was she thinkin'). He hasn't figured out pretend play yet, which is why they teach it in the class I guess.

The rest of the week was spent in the yard. It is amazing how much longer things take when you have a young baby that needs to be fed and put to sleep and everything all the time, because I would have to wash up each time she needed me. But I am really happy to see that our lawn no longer looks like white trash!

What all the flower beds looked like last week:

What it looks like now:

Basically, the house had been vacant for almost two years when we bought it, so weeds had taken over the universe. I tried to work on that, but I didn't even know what was flower and what was weed, and then Christopher ended up bulldozing over the whole thing the next year anyway. The yard needed to be re-sloped away from the house so the basement wouldn't flood again. We planted grass last spring, but by the time the grass was in enough to walk on and get to the flower beds, we couldn't even tell where the beds began and ended anymore. This is a picture of the worst point, almost exactly 2 years ago, when we had ripped out the driveway and the yard but not put anything in yet (I wasn't kidding about the "trashy" bit):

And this is how it looks currently, after pouring a new driveway, building a retaining wall, planting grass, taking out a dead aspen tree, getting concrete curbing for the flower beds, weeding the beds and putting down mulch:

And now you know why this makes me so very happy. There are no new flowers this year, just mulch. Next year I will get that ambitious, but for now I am content with a clean slate.

Oh, and our other project for the week has been trying out dermatend. It claims to remove moles without surgery, and much cheaper to boot. The downside is that you have to keep a band-aid on it the whole time- which is at least a week by the time the scab heals over. So if you see me with band-aids on my forehead, don't worry. It is going well so far! Hopefully by this time next week I can give these guys a full recommendation.

And finally, if you haven't seen Dr. Horrible yet, I highly recommend it. No really, follow the link. Hilarious! And it will dissapear next week. So hurry.