I suppose I should blog again.

I'd like to take this opportunity to update you all on our lives.

All spring, I'd been half-heartedly getting the backyard ready for grass. Our long-term plan when we bought our house was to have some grass in the backyard, and what we keep calling a tricycle path around it. This was important so the kids would be able to play outside in the safety of our own backyard. (More recently, they've enjoyed playing outside by digging in the dirt, as though our entire yard were a large sandbox. I've wanted to get the grass in so that the kids would get less dirty.)

I'd only been half-hearted about it because I decided I needed to get sprinklers in place before laying sod. I'm more than competent at installing sprinklers, but it's fairly difficult to dig trenches for sprinkler lines. So I'd occasionally get motivated and work on it, but then I'd get tired of it and wouldn't do anything for several weeks. (Or we'd get caught up in another project, like our laundry room).

So, about halfway through May, I finished with the sprinklers, and then said to Kelsea, "Now we're ready for grass," and we both laughed. Then we thought, wait, maybe we are. Could we be? Can we? So we called around and found out Lowe's and Star Nursery had plenty of sod waiting for us. A few hours of tilling and raking the next morning, and we went and picked up some sod and laid it out. (We had to get a little more a couple hours later).

Suddenly, we had grass!. The kids were amazed. The next step, of course, was the "tricycle path." I had designed the sprinkler spray pattern to coincide with where we wanted the tricycle path to be. To make this part of the story shorter than the first part of the story, and to bore you slightly less than you expected, I'll summarize. We put in the sidewalk "tricycle path" on Saturday. It was harder work preparing than actually putting it in, despite the use of wheelbarrows. So now the major part of our backyard is done, and the kids can race around on their bikes, trikes, and scooters.

That's not really the most important thing going on right now. We're actually expecting a baby in November. Mia has drawn at least one picture of the family, including a "baby in mommy's tummy." It's pretty fun to talk about changes and a new sibling with Holly and Mia. We told Jay about it, and he laughed and said "no," like we were telling a very good knock knock joke. He might start to believe it if Kelsea ever starts to show.

Other than that, and to further bury the important updates with the mundane, we got a new (to us) minivan recently. It was Kelsea's parents, and the transmission is supposedly going bad, but it's been fine so far, Kelsea likes it, and the kids enjoy the extra space when we go places. Jay generally begs to go places in the "blue car," but yesterday he realized the van was kind of blue too, and called it the blue car. That's progress.

That should do it for at least a month or so.