leaves, leaves, and more leaves!

I've fallen off the blog band (so to speak). I've been naughty. I know. I get online every day, sign in to my blogger account, excitedly click on the names of the blogs that I read to see if they've posted anything new and then I get all excited and giddy when I see a new post. I am a hypocrite. I don't make new, exciting blogs for people to read. I don't know if anyone excitedly gets online every day to see if I've posted anything new, but just in case someone did - I'm not delivering. I've been lazy, uninspired - a procrastinator. Yes, I said it. I admitted it. I will not promise to not be any of these things anymore though because - well, that would be silly on my part because I'm not perfect. :) But I CAN promise to try to be better and to at least TRY to post more often and make my life sound real exciting and wonderful. lol Well, it is some days and I love my life, but my every day happenings aren't get-your-camera-out-and-record-them-then-blog-them happenings.

So anyways, rewind a few weeks back to November. Our yard was covered in leaves! You could barely see our sidewalk because of the leaves. They were everywhere! We decided to take a Saturday and do a yard clean up. Cole spent the night at his grandparents, so it was just Chris and I with Mason. Chris had discovered 3 wonderful tools last year for picking up the leaves in the fall - his quad, a tarp, and a leaf blower. Just those two things made all the difference in the world. He used the leaf blower and blew all the leaves into one big pile in the front yard. I, on the other hand, got to use the rake to help him push the big piles together. Once the leaves piled up together, it was hard for the blower to move them - c'mon, we only have a small blower. So, I used the rake to push the leaves. Well, our two rakes we own are both broken. Yes, broken. The handles on both of them are about 18 inches long. I know I'm short, but seriously. Even 18 inches of handle on a rake is too short for me! So, all day long I got to bend over like a little old lady and rake leaves. Chris kept offering to switch with me to give me a break, but I couldn't bare the thought of him bending over to do it. He'd have to bed over twice as far as me and his back is worse than mine. Although it would have been funny to watch I kindly thanked him but declined his offer. I just stood up every few minutes and stretched my back. Along with major back discomfort, I was growing blisters on my hands from my leather gardening gloves. They were rubbing my hands raw. Mason had a blast though. He used the other broken rake, which was perfect height for him, and "helped" rake the leaves. :) Once we got all the leaves into one huge pile, we laid out the tarp and raked them onto the tarp, then Chris used his quad straps to hook the tarp to the quad and we hauled them to the back yard behind our shed. It probably cut our leaf raking and yard clean up in half or more compared to the old way we used to do it! Plus, we save money on not having to buy yard bags. The pile of leaves behind our shed got so high it was taller than Chris by the time we were done.

Well, when you're raking leaves, you HAVE to stop and take time to jump in them. You just have to. :)




























And I just want to clarify that he is not being thrown into the branches. I know it looks like it. But he's not. :)

It was a day filled with lots of hard work and a little fun. Chris asked me that night when we were passed out on the couch, "Doesn't it feel good to do hard work like that?" My reply: "No. Ask me in a few days when my body isn't hurting anymore." It was nice to see our yard all cleaned and the grass cut, but my body hurt so bad that night! I didn't think I was going to be able to get out of bed in the morning. I barely made it. I felt like I had just had another c-section! lol That's how I walked and that's how I sat down and stood up. It wasn't pretty. Needless to say, I did NOT cook dinner that night. The last thing I wanted to do was stand in the kitchen and cook. We got take out, and we vegged out on the couch for the rest of the night.

Next year, we will be buying new rakes. Ones that have regular sized handles to them. And I will be buying cotton gardening gloves.