My Little Sweat Shop

Anyone who's been to my house knows that the lady who used to live here loved playing in her garden.  I kid you not, this woman had a jungle growing in the back garden; everything from onions, to rose bushes to tulips to ginger root.   And there was no rhyme or reason to any of it.  It was as if she threw a bunch of seeds up in the sky and allowed them to root where they landed.

Today I decided to rally the troops and we decided to tackle the yard, and of course they were thrilled.  Here's an idea of the garden we were dealing with.....trust me the picture doesn't do it justice.

The boys were great troopers and worked for 2 solid hours

We even got to the crazy weed garden growing along the side of our house.....the side where the A/C unit is, that is only about the size of a dog run.

I was really proud of how hard everyone worked.  I can't believe how much bigger our yard looks.  (But you can sure see how nasty the fence looks now.  That's going to have to be another project for another day).

We even got to picking the apples up in our apple tree.

They came away with a pretty good haul, too.  It looks like I'm going have to start scouring Pinterest to find recipes and cool things to do with apples.

I'm sure proud of how hard the boys worked and how it was mostly without grumbling and everyone getting along.  And just so you don't think I'm the worst slave driving mom in history, I rewarded them with a BBQ steak dinner and ice cream sandwiches for dessert.

A little bit of Summer Catch Up

As is typical, my blogging tends to slow down during the summer break, as I like to spend as much free time during these "lazy" months as I can with my family.  Ross and I had a week off of work together and decided to have some fun with the boys.

But first, it was date night.  Hubby surprised me on my lunch break last Friday with tickets for the two of us to go see Cirque du Soliel that was playing here in Lethbridge.  It was a fantastic, amazing, jaw dropping show and I loved every second of it.  I could seriously watch it every single night.

It was an absolutely brilliant show.  And apparently this was just a "teaser" of the full show that they do in Vegas.  I swear I could spend an entire month in Vegas just going to shows.

Then it was time to have fun with the boys.  We started out our week with a trip to Calgary to see their big brother, Chris.  But we also wanted to check out the new Telus Spark Science Centre.  It didn't disappoint. There were tons of things to do for kids of all ages, and the boys had a blast.  They even had a huge dome theatre (much like IMAX), where we saw a couple of really interesting shows.

The next day we headed up to Sylvan Lake to spend a day at the water slides with Uncle Jon and Auntie Brandy.  It was awesome....the sky was a bit overcast, so we didn't have to worry about heatstroke or sunburn and we had a wonderfully fun day and a great dinner in Red Deer afterwards.

As we were leaving the restaurant, a huge hail storm hit Red Deer, so we decided to hunker down and spend the night in a hotel and go back to Calgary the next day......which is exactly what we did.  And when we got back to Calgary, the boys decided that they wanted to hit Calaway Park before having dinner with Chris and his girlfriend, Amber.  So another day of fun was had. (Pics to come later....I had to take them on my phone as my camera battery died).

Anyway, so that coupled with a couple of trips to 2 of Calgary's Leisure Centre's is why I have been absent from blog land.  Hope you're all having a great summer.