The Great Outdoors

Ah, remember not too long ago I was complaining (a lot!) about the snow and ice and cold? Well, we had NONE of that today! It was gorgeous! We spent the majority of the day outdoors taking down the Christmas lights (finally!), fertilizing the lawn, weeding & cleaning up the landscape garden out front, and other general outdoor upkeep. Ella & Lily were happy to be running around outside. They dug out the bubble stuff from the garage and entertained themselves with that for awhile. They squirted water with the hose. And they were quite the little helpers, first helping Andrew with the Christmas lights and then Lily helped me rake the landscape bed.





They also spent a good deal of time collecting worms, slugs and caterpillars while I gardened. They walked around with the various creatures sitting on their sleeves, at least until one squiggly worm maneuvered its way INTO Lily's sleeve. She wasn't so interested in creatures after that. She was pretty freaked out. Luckily, I was wearing garden gloves through all this or they would have been on their own with the slimey things. :-)



In the afternoon, they wanted to ride their bikes to the park. Well, this took forever as Ella kept getting tired and didn't want to ride. And Lily is quite the dawdler on her trike just peddling only as fast (or as slow) as she feels like. We did make it to the park after an eternity and I promptly walked back and got the car--while Andrew stayed and played with them--because there was no way the girls were going to make it ALL the way back home (yes, it is only 1/2 mile to the park).



When we got back from the park, the kids played out back for awhile. The little boy next door, Jeffery came out and he and Ella played for 45 minutes or so. Unfortunately, he and his very nice family moved and they are selling their house. Gee, hope no riff raff moves into the neighborhood. And let's hope the new neighbors will be just as nice and still let us use their swing set whenever we want. ;-)



We grilled out steaks for dinner and now everyone is calming down before bed, which will be early because 1) the kids are exhausted from all the fresh air and 2) neither of them had naps today. Whoo hoo! I love this weather! Weather forecast for tomorrow: rain and gloom. :-( At least we had one perfect day before the wet weather settles in again.

And of course the great weather provided a wonderful backdrop for me to take a bazillion new pictures. I've added some here to this post and to the April photo album.