Patio Upgrades and Rat Tails

Hi

Once again, we are on the subject of the infamous patio. However, this is a happy post about the completion. Not just a phase of the patio completion, but completion completion! We had our flower beds filled with 200-300 dollars worth of flowering bushes that all claimed to be FULL SUN, which meant 6+ hours of direct sun exposure a day. Check. We were going to be giving them much more than 6 hours a day, our backyard offers no reprieve from sunshine. Unfortunately, all the lovely flowering bushes couldn't handle the abundance of sunshine we had to offer. So, they shriveled up and died. It was a sad day at the Williams household.

5 out of the 6 plants featured here are dead

Needless to say, the patio was not feeling as calm and tranquil as we intended with bush carcases everywhere. So, we dug them up and returned them to Lowes for new plants (even exchange too, thaaaanks Lowes). But how were we going to keep the new shipment alive with 12 hours of full on sunshine a day? I--me, all by myself-- came up with the idea of SHADE STRUCTURES (say it like Oprah would). With my brains and Matt's brawn we erected these beauties....

The East side of the patio gets a sunshine break in the morning and the West side gets a break in the evening--based on where the shadows fall. Go ahead and say it: Genius!

Remember me saying how hard our ground is to dig though and how it took almost a month to dig down 7 inches for the patio? Here is evidence of the cement like quality of the ground we are working with.



Back to Lowes for a new shovel

Now, on to Clark Watch 2011

At his 1 month check up Clark has tanked up to a whopping 10.7 pounds. That is a 4 pound increase from birth. I think it is a combination of all the protein I eat and the creatine we mix into his breast milk. Either that or his rat tail is bulking him out.

Awesome

Clark has also started to sleep all night in his crib, which allows us to get a much better night's sleep because we don't hear him squawking all night long. Everyone is much happier and well rested--when I say everyone I really mean me. He wakes up once to eat and then it is right back to dreamland (most nights), I love my happy baby who cherishes his night time sleep as much as I do. There are the occasional nights he thinks it is time to have a dance party at 3am, but those are few and far between.

He absolutely loves Krum's ears and go nutz when they touch his face. Krum is starting to come around and isn't trying to shove him off our laps anymore. We had a few issues in the beginning.



Hope everyone has a good week!

Colie