Weekend Warriors

The HGTV camera crew needs to swing by casa de phillips and take some footage because Tobe and I were landscaping fools this weekend.

Perhaps "Landscaping fools" is a bit dramatic, but the time devoted to working on our backyard by two people who often comment on how the first thing they would do should they win the lottery is hire a full-time Gardner is quite remarkable.

Back when Isaac was a small baby, I recall one of my friends advising me that when the time came to purchase a playhouse we should buy one with a floor. I quickly lost that little parenting tidbit amongst the feeding schedules and sleep training and baby food making. Fast-forward almost three years and we are the proud owners of a beautiful Little Tikes log cabin playhouse....that does not have its own floor. Add some rain and some leaves and random tuffs of grass and the log cabin quickly becomes quite the messy place to play.

I came up with the excellent idea of creating our own personal playground in our backyard, marked off and filled with mulch. I figured if the floor of the cabin was mulched it would be less muddy and void of random pieces of grass. My initial plans for the playground-in-our backyard were much too grand and Tobe was quick to point out that it would take us many, many hours of hard labor to undertake such a project. We scaled the plans back and are happy with the end result...so happy we might even expand the playground eventually.

Here are the before pictures: A sad corner in the backyard After hours spent digging up grass (a lot that I pulled by hand)and leveling out of the yard, we added border and mulch.
The log cabin's new home...complete with flowers. We also bought rubber door mats with large holes and placed those inside the cabin as additional flooring.
Home Sweet Home
These were our two assistants.

Tobe also planted a crop of cotton to go along with his corn and did two large flowerbeds alongside the house.
Please excuse Isaac's hat...it happens to be his sun hat from last summer and is on inside out. I tried to get him to select a hat for this summer (kids should wear hats in the sun) during a recent trip to Wal-Mart, but they were all too small for his head in the toddler section. Looks like we need to shop for head gear over in the Big Boys department.
Evelyn loves this hat....LOVES IT. She cried anytime we took it off and has worn it all weekend. Good thing she can pull off the hat look, because neither Tobe nor I are able to sport a hat and look decent.