Good News

It's too late at night for me to start a blog post, so I will keep this brief. Or not. I just had to share a major gardening DIY victory with you. I'm building a trellis for my brambles (finally!) and it's hard work. My body is soooooo tired.

I borrowed our neighbor's post hole digger, which the boys loved to see in action. Robert kept sticking his leg down into the hole as far as it would go. James tried it, too, but somehow accidentally got both legs into the hole, and Robert went crazy wanting to cram both of his legs down a three-foot-deep rabbit hole, too. Once he was in up to his hips, he asked me to step on his head to shove him in deeper.

Seriously, dude?

James was happy to step on him, by the way, and Robert tells me it worked well.

That was the first hole. It was the easy one. The second hole ran into some random brick/concrete/metal debris that my neighbor muscled through for me. Such a nice guy. Thanks, Wayne. We'll be delivering some cookies to him tomorrow when I return the post hole digger.

The third hole was a real doozy. That's the hole that put me in this world of hurt. In order to line up the three posts juuuuuust so, I had to put the final post in the middle of a buried tree stump. Not just any tree stump, either. A seriously tough hardwood stump from a tree that used to stand 20-30 feet tall. Ouch. I purchased a hatchet and hacked out part of the stump. Robert and James found the idea of me wielding a freakishly sharp ax fascinating. They tussled over who would get to stand closest to me while I hacked away.

Matthew napped through much of this, but spent a good amount of time in the front yard, too, today. He ate some mulch, shimmied over cobblestone borders, and whacked sticks on stuff. He even attempted to stand unassisted in the middle of our sloped driveway. He almost succeeded. I did not allow him anywhere near the ax :)

The hatchet wasn't enough, however, so I pulled out my cordless reciprocating saw. The boys liked that, too. Alice came out to play and begged Robert to join her in a "stranded pioneer" imaginary game. He just couldn't pull himself away from watching the saw...or the ax...or crawling through the thorny maze of raspberry canes...again and again. I chipped and sawed and pounded and dug around that silly stump for hours. Finally, finally, the hole was just right and I put the third post in place.

Ahhhh. So pretty.

The trellis is not done, but I already love it. I topped the 4x4 posts with some nifty caps I found in the DIY deck section at Home Depot. They're a nice touch. Very classy. Now to find a way to transport a 16-foot length of livestock fencing to my house...hmmmmm.