Busy busy...

We have been working like mad men and have done TONS of work on our yard. Those of you that know me know I rarely take before and after pictures, so the contrast of what it looked like before and what it looked like after is probably much smaller since you'll just see the after pictures, but just envision a whole tree cut down and how messy that makes everything- and you can envision it's now ALL cleaned up! And I have been a consistent weeder and waterer of my garden and side yard, and so we have a pretty awesome garden going on. (Besides the raspberry bushes- sorry Leslie! We planted them right away and watered them lots, but it looks like our efforts weren't enough.) Here's a walk through of our now not as ghetto looking yard. :)

Happy house front also fixed. It has been crumbling for awhile, but we got the stucco redone and so hopefully it will stay that way!

Here's the new garden box Eric built on Saturday. We don't know what to plant in it. It gets lots of sun, and TONS of water, and we were thinking an herb or something that we could use and smells really yummy, with some flowers mixed in, but what do you guys think? We also have the garden box on the other side open for a fresh pallet of garden ideas.

All the wood we chopped from our tree with our neighbor's wood chopper machine. It seriously saved us hours and hours. Still work, but it cut down our time spent tremendously. If you guys need firewood, we have more than we will ever need, just come and take some. Seriously.

And our garden. 6 tomato plants (I love tomatoes!) 1 golden pepper plant, two squash plants, one died, so those leaves on the left are just the one plant taking over. And four dead raspberry plants. Sorry Leslie- we tried our best! Thanks for them!

And this heat- can I say I don't know how you guys in Arizona and Texas do it! I pretty much am dying from the last 5 days of such hot weather. My energy level plummets in heat like this. At least our heat hasn't been TOO bad at night so I'm sleeping ok still. We only had one pretty crazy hot night, but the rest we've been able to cool ourselves down with a small window fan, so that's nice. I always feel bad for Jack since he sleeps in another room, and he goes to sleep before the heat subsides mostly, which means he's been waking up more, and so we have been having him sleep in our room when he goes down at 7 PM with the AC pointed to him until it gets darker and cooler. But it hasn't even been a week of this way hot weather, so I feel super blessed that it won't be too much longer as we get into August and it should start cooling down! This summer really hasn't been bad at all- HOORAY!!!

Also for fun news- we'll be finding out if our baby is a boy or girl on Thursday! We are super thrilled either one, and have absolutely no idea which he/she could be. If you wanted to vote in the comment section it would be fun to see what all of you guys think. I'm definitely getting bigger and bigger, and keep getting told I can't hide my being pregnant anymore. Not that I was trying to, but I guess that might mean I'm not fitting in my clothes anymore, and probably need to switch to the maternity kind. Fun day. We are thrilled though, and are excited for this new baby!