A Good Mother's Day Weekend...

Mother's day is typically the first time I really venture outdoors to begin the gardening season. This year I was not feeling quite ready for the challenge of both indoors and outdoors, but spending the time outside this weekend cured the hesitancy in me! What a glorious time I was able to spend with my family! We grilled almost every meal-had Mom and Dad over on Sunday, and spent all day today preparing the yard and gardens. The first was major job to tackle was taking down one of our apple trees-sniff sniff. It is beautiful, but over the years the wasps have gotten more and more vicious with the kiddos. By the end of the season last year, not a day went by without a bee sting. The apples were not edible, so we decided sadly, that it wasn't serving much of a purpose. We have plans for planting new trees, but for now we will be clearing that spot for our pool. I spent the early evening hours in a magical garden hideaway with the kids. We built it from the tree branches we cut down. I have an old swing set frame in my main garden that we used to prop the cut branches on. They won't stay there for long, we will be planting the garden soon and the branches of course will not stay looking so magical for long, but the girls especially, found this idea inspiring. I think school under the branches tomorrow will be in order. We also were able to build a new box for transplanting our raspberries across the yard. Hoping the transplant goes well for the years to come! Raspberries everyday it one of summer's best gifts!! Here are just some fun pictures of our day today...

Magic Garden Surprise

After a wonderful day of getting in some of the gardens, swimming in the pool(my kiddos braved the frigid water that was just put in yesterday!), and just some good old family game time, I had a chance to sneak away to the backyard and put up some magical lights just in time to have our family devotions outside under the apple tree just after dark. I had asked Matt earlier, to do me a favor, but not to ask why. "Please get me the Christmas lights up in the attic." He did ever so nicely even though going up in the attic is on the top ten list of "Things he hates to do". What a sweetie! Our devotions were appropriately titled "Limb climber or Branch sitter." It was a reflection on the limb God asked Joseph to climb out on in order to take Mary as his wife and raise Jesus. Trusting the Lord to do what he asks of us sometimes can be like climbing out on a shaky limb instead of sitting on a sturdy branch in which we have grown comfortable on. But it was mentioned in our devotions that no one knows that better than Jesus, who hung from a tree! It was pretty cool to sit out under the apple tree as we read. We actually managed to squeeze six of us on the swing(Noah is already of in dreamland). But I do not think that faithful old swing would have held up much longer than our devotions:)