Bah-dee and the great outdoors

Heaven. That’s the only word I can come up with to describe the weather we’re having today. Hea-VEN. Sunshine. Soft breezes. Perfect temperature. I don’t know what it is, but it’s perfect. G and I wanted to go outside and stay there forever.

So we did, sort of. As soon as everyone was finished with breakfast and the sleepover friend had gone home, we filed out, with a number of tasks in mind – first and foremost, setting up the pool. G brought all the pieces out; the girls helped remove them from the boxes; metal poles were pieced together and the liner was attached; hoses were turned on; and voila:

Would you like to know why it’s July 5 and we’re just setting up our pool now? Well, I can answer that in four letters: R-A-I-N. Go check the weather records for our area, and you will SEE why we have only set up our pool now.

Once the Boy was asleep and the girls and G were working on the pool, I got hold of some kitchen shears, and then of Elaine’s gigantic psycho-death garden shears (Elaine is Allison’s mother), and I attacked some of the bushes, attempting to make the growing part of our yard look more like a yard, and less like a hostile southeast Asian jungle. Here’s part of what resulted:

Now mind you, that is only ONE pile. There are others. Also mind you, I have no gardening gloves. I used to, but that was back when I was trying to build a pond, and I think they went the way of all the piles of dirt that were hauled away by the landscaper. Heh. I also have no shovel (not that I’d try to use one without gloves), so the roots of all those jungle death plants are all still happily tucked into the ground, which means the jungle bushes are just going to grow back. But at least for the moment, they are no longer strangling my overgrown and wholly untended hydrangea bush. See?

I can’t tell you how much better that bush looks now that all those huge weedy things are lying dead on the ground. I should have taken a “before” picture, but I wasn’t quite sure where I was headed when I first disappeared into the green, wielding my weapons. I just knew that I could tell what belonged and what didn’t.

Or maybe not. It so happens that when I was finished, and I took a step back to examine the effect, I discovered that I’d pretty much trimmed away part of a big bushy thing that technically (I think) was supposed to be there. But it was overgrown, is the point, and one thing is for sure: it is no longer. Heh.

Not sure you can really tell from that picture, but there you have it. I’d take one with my actual camera, but getting it out of the camera onto the actual computer is sort of a pain in the neck.

I also spent some time engaged in battle with some sort of shrub that for some reason, the Lord has seen fit to equip with numerous small swords, as follows:

Isn’t that cool, the way there’s a picture of the thorn AND of the shadow?

Anyway, YOW did I get poked, and splintered, like, a few times. But that only solidified my determination to get rid of as much of that monster as possible so as to protect innocent children and hydrangeas. Once again, however, I left the roots/trunk/whatever you call the bottom part of a shrub right there in the ground, so presumably there will be another thorny monster there to do battle with next year. No problem; I’ll just borrow Elaine’s shears again.

I was a bit concerned, incidentally, about leaving the thorny shrub pieces just sitting out for the yard waste collecting guys to grab and be injured by. RS, ever the worrier/empathetic one, was similarly concerned, and I’m proud to say that the collecting guys will be amply forewarned:

You can’t quite see the purple exclamation point at the end of the word “thornes,” but it’s there.

When I was finished with the thorn bush and the other weedy thing, I proceeded to the other side of the yard, and commenced battle with a large number of healthy, thriving, Tarzan-style vines, which had made themselves at home amongst the forsythia and this other flower-sprouting thing. What with all the R-A-I-N we’ve been having, the vines had managed to grow to quite impressive lengths. I’d locate one – not difficult to do, since they tend to coil themselves around their neighboring bushes, thusly:

and also thusly:

as well as thusly:

Once I’d located them, I’d unwind and/or snip them, and then I’d grab them and pull. And pull. And keep pulling. And I kid you not – some of those babies were at least ten feet long. Probably 20.

Too bad Tarzan doesn’t live here.

When I was finished de-vining, I prowled around the front, the side, and the back of the house, brandishing my shears, hunting for other weeds, or possibly bushes, to pull and/or trim and/or destroy. Ultimately, I had to give up, and I went for the old outdoor standby: Picking clovers.

The girls, in the meantime, were busily watching G finishing up with the pool:

Those white spots weren’t there when I took the picture. But you get the idea.

Once the pool was filled, the girls went jumping in, ignoring our warnings about how cold the water would be; within minutes, they were jumping out again, teeth chattering, squealing about being freezing. Told you so.

Once I’d removed all the backyard clovers I could find, I tossed them over the fence to the bunnies. It took a few minutes, but eventually the bunnies emerged from their little hiding place and dug right in:

Cute, no? That grayish-brown guy with the white nose is Jack, and the white beauty with the brown spots is his girlfriend, Bambi. She’s been with us the longest. She was my second bunny rabbit ever. Jack’s previous girlfriend, Jill, has passed on, as have Wendy, Alex, Smoky, and Vera. Ask my daughters; they’ll tell you all about it.

While the rabbits ate and the girls squealed and G played around with pool chemicals, the Boy eventually woke up, at which point it was time to go out for pizza. The Boy is fond of pizza, and apparently since the last time he ate it, he’s developed a name for it: “Bah-dee.” When we entered the pizza store, he immediately began pointing at the pizza behind the glass.

“Bah-dee! Bah-dee! Bah-dee!”

Apparently not convinced his point had been made, he raised the decibel level and the pitch about 5,000%: “BAAAAAH-dee! BAAAAAH-dee!” I think I might have heard some of the glass cracking.

In any case, the bah-dee was soon served, and we all began to eat:

When we were finished, we recited the Grace After Meals:

We then went shopping for dinner materials, and then to Dunkin Donuts for dessert. That is, the girls had dessert; G supervised, and the Boy and I sat outside, the Boy chewing on coffee stirrers and smashing himself into the window, shouting things to his father (”AAABBA!”) and his sisters (”HI! HI! AGUBADEHGUH! ABIGGEDEH! HI! HI!”), who(m?) he could see on the other side.

So now here we are, home again. The girls already attempted to go swimming again, and have already come running back into the house, wrapped in towels, teeth chattering (”It’s FREEZING!”), and they are now upstairs taking baths. The Boy, oddly, in spite of his three-hour nap earlier, has insisted on being put to sleep again. Maybe it was all the BAH-dee and fresh air. G is doing something boring on his computer, and I am sitting here writing this next to the open window, inhaling the breeze and itching to finish so I can get myself back outside. To do what, I have no idea. Perhaps some of the backyard clovers have grown back.

Tags: Kids, The Boy