This Weekend

This past weekend Nana came to visit. The boys had so much fun (and I got them to clean their room with minimal complaining!!). Saturday we went to the zoo. We went early and it was pretty comfortable for most of the zoo and not very crowded. We walked all the zoo, then we took a train ride, which we had not done before. It was a pretty good length of a ride - longer than most. The zoo suffered quite a bit of tree damage - lots of huge trees through our ride that had been blown over or just split. We even saw one tree that went THROUGH another tree.

Sunday, after watching a couple of landscaping shows on HGTV, I decided that I was going to get busy taking out some of the flowerbeds in our backyard. We have several flowerbeds that are in the middle of our yard. One of them had nothing but weeds in it. It looked like at some point there may have been a tree in it, but it was just a bed of rocks and weeds with a few buried pots that used to be flowers. Nana helped me pull all the weeds out of the bed, then I picked up the majority of the gravel that was in the bed, all of the boundary bricks and leveled it all out. Hopefully, the grass will fill it in soon! Daddy cleaned out some trash (rotted wood, pavers, etc) that were behind the house and laid the gravel from the removed bed down. That is where we keep the ladders, wheelbarrow, etc. Thank you Nana for playing with and keeping an eye on the boys while we did that!!!

Then we went to lunch and decided to show Nana some of the plantations just north of us. We saw a sign for a campground (which earlier that morning Paul asked if I wanted to go camping next weekend). We went to check it out and detoured AGAIN when we saw a sign for a plantation that was a museum. We did not have time to do the tour before we had to get Nana to the airport, but we did go walk the grounds. We met Gus, a VERY friendly turkey (and very BIG) that likes to show off and try to follow you inside. We saw a peacock, cows, geese, lots of pretty flowers, etc. Luckily, we did not meet up with the resident cottonmouth snake!! Since this was an unplanned adventure, I was wearing flipflops (one reason I was glad we did not meet the resident snake) and I did not have my camera. :( We plan on going back this weekend and doing the tour and TAKING THE CAMERA!! It was really beautiful though.

After we took Nana to the airport, Daddy came home and did some more work outside. We had cleared out about 5 bunches of cannas that the hurricane had destroyed, but since there were still bulbs in the ground, they were coming back. Daddy took a pick ax out there and cleaned out two of the areas. I am not liking the magnitude of our landscaping, not to mention the lack of color. Especially since so many of the plants go shredded during the hurricane. It all looks really sloppy right now. We are going to spend some time cleaning out some of the large landscaping (elephant ears, cannas, etc), trimming bushes, etc so that we can tone down everything against the house (kinda reminds me of a jungle) and get some FLOWERS with COLOR!!!

Thank you Nana for visiting. We enjoyed it and had fun! Enjoy catching up on your sleep now!!