Ella was more excited than Riley, she loves her big sister
Wow, class of 2024, that's crazy. My oldest baby, Riley, graduated from kindergarten last night. Yes I shed a tear, it's just the beginning of what will fly by until she graduates high school. Grandma & Grandpa Eberhard came with us to watch her little performance. They sang about 6 songs and then there was a video presentation with pictures and videos of their year in kindergarten. There was one background song in the video called "Let Them Be Little"
**Warning...you will bawl your eyes out.**
We are so proud of our sweet girl, her kindergarten teacher is retiring this year and couldn't say enough good things about Riley. She said she's bright, kind-hearted, and that she's going to go really far in life. That we are sure of. We love you.
Before we moved here my experience with gardening was very minimal. I would buy some annuals that looked ok together and plant them in some hanging baskets. Now that the sun is out all the time I wanted to spend a lot of time outside enjoying the best part of the house. The front yard was a mess, branches on the trees had never been pruned, random bricks were lying around the outside of the house, I could go on and on. So I asked a friend to come by who happens to work in landscape design to give me some advice on what to do. I spent about 3 weeks trimming trees, cleaning up the back, buying perennials and annuals, digging, planting, mulching, and laying down edging stones. There was a lot of time spent watching youtube videos on how to garden! It was a lot of work but I've really enjoyed every minute spent outside making it look ten times better. It's really been a lot of fun and I hope to keep working on the yard year after year. Here are some before and after pictures of the front garden bed.
Before
After!
The only thing between the grass and the garden were some rocks
I started by cutting in an edge to define the garden
I added edging stone, new mulch, and about ten new plants
I bought that terra cotta pot to replace a plastic green one
My patriotic arrangement
Owen pointing out the flowers
A lot of the plants and shrubs I bought will grow tall enough to eventually cover the lattice
I've been a slacker lately with the blog, it's not that we're not doing anything, I just keep forgetting to take pictures. The past two weeks I've been outside in the yard cutting down branches from all the trees in our yard, digging out old plants, and planting new ones. I never got into our yard in WA partly because I was so discouraged at how out of control weeds were up there. It's nice to have a yard I really love and now I get to decorate. I'll take some pictures soon when I get all the flowers in. I just have a few pictures of the kids just hanging out. And busy Owen getting into everything, I swear any quiet minute is him getting into something he shouldn't. He's just so cute though, it's hard to ever be upset with him.
This looks like a spotlight but it's just our skylight, I think this may be foreshadowing for her future
So I'm a little behind on posts...so we'll skip to Easter! It was a beautiful sunny day today, the girls had three Easter Egg hunts over the weekend. One was a friend's birthday at a park, the other was at Jarom's parents house, and the last one was this morning at our house. It was a busy but fun weekend. I made a quiche this morning, and we had one of Jarom's friends over for brunch. She just moved here from WA to work for Jarom at his new building. Since this is our first spring here at the house it's fun to see what blossoms out in the yard. We have some amazing trees that cover our deck out back, I could be out there all day just lounging.
My little boy, Owen, turned one yesterday! It's been a crazy year and it seemed to have flown by way too fast. We took Owen to a little children's museum up in Lafayette to celebrate. His favorite thing there was a piano, he just lit up when he heard the noise he could make. His least favorite thing was the sandbox, he started crying as soon as his little feet hit the sand. Then we went back to Jarom's parents house where we had cake and presents. These videos are hysterical since this isn't the usual Owen we know. He looked at us like we were crazy people. Riley wrapped one of his gifts and wrote such a sweet note to him (pic below). He is such a joy in our lives and I hope he'll always be a mama's boy :)
It's almost always sunny here, and sometimes we even get days in the 60s like today. I forgot to upload these pictures from a couple weeks ago. Just a day at the park.
Owen took his first steps a couple weeks ago, but this time he's getting braver and taking a lot more. He gets super excited when he goes far and it's so cute to watch how proud he is. He'll take the title for the earliest walker among the three. Riley and Ella were about 13 months. Owen's birthday is next Saturday :)
