From Baseball to Springtime Woes and everything in between...

Springtime has brought with it much to do! It's been cold and rainy and hard to find time to work in the yard (which looks like a tornado hit it...literally), but nonetheless I still try and find time to go out front for even five minutes with my little hand saw to cut away slowly at the ugly evergreen bushes that abundantly line our driveway. We've lived in our house for almost 6 years and they have been the bane of my existence since we moved in. They get overgrown so easily, making it difficult to walk between them and our cars parked in the driveway, our driveway acts as a vacuum and collects all the Falls leaves and garbage from neighbors and it all gets stuck in and under those dumb bushes, and they are a nesting ground for garter snakes and hornets. So as you can imagine I am finally fed up. There were a total of about 9 bushes on one side of our steps and 3 on the other side. I have cut out about 5 of them total, but with all the rain have failed to have time to clean up any of the debris. The pictures below depict the work that this involves. My goal is to cut them all down to stumps for this year, get the area all cleaned up and leave the stumps to rot until next year.

Then the other day our family experienced a disturbing loss. As we were leaving the house to pick up kids from school, Raymond exclaimed that there was a bird stuck in our front tree. I looked and saw a Robin hanging from our tree by a string, dead. Upon further inspection the string had acted just like a noose and was wrapped tightly around his neck and the string had gotten caught on a small branch in our tree. How this phenomenon happened, I don't know. I know that no one put it there, but think the string was from our front yard that we have wrapped around stakes to block off an area of our grass that has grass seed in it so people don't walk on it. The rain had recently weakened it and the birds snipped it, so maybe they thought it was a worm, or maybe he wanted to use it for a nest...nonetheless he should have just left it alone because it was his downfall. I still can't picture how in the world he got it around his neck and tightenend but freak things happen all the time. So when Tony got home from work, he shimmied up the tree and cut the string down with scissors and we disposed of the body. One of the daycare moms joked that Spring must have gotten the best of him and he ended it all. Not funny....but kinda.

Another sad note...one of my long term daycare kids has moved away. I took a couple of pictures of her on her last day.

Tess recently got some super cute cowgirl boots from her Grandpa Jerry and wife Lisa. She has been wearing them lately and I just thought we needed a cute picture of her in her boots. She's getting ready for her Wild West adventure trip in July.

Last night we were able to get 6 free tickets to the Creighton University vs. Southern Illinois University baseball game at the brand new stadium. It was super fun, I love going to baseball games, and the kids enjoyed it and the weather was actually perfect. So below are a few pictures from that and to end this post are just a couple other cute pictures of my kids. :)

My pitcher

Action shot!

After math of the Creighton baseball game. :)