I started back at work last week.  It’s part time, so I can’t complain, but even part time, I feel like I am not able to get much done.  My days are spent playing catch-up.  Before maternity leave I never would have believed how much time I could spend cleaning and organizing, and yet never feel like the house is totally clean or organized.  I’m off 3 days during the week so my goal is Monday’s free time is for cleaning and regrouping and Wednesday/Thursday’s free time is for working in the garage during nap times.  We’ll see how that goes.  I’m trying to work at making Lucy’s sleep time more productive for myself.

I woke up this morning at 6 to feed Lucy and decided I should just stay up and get a few things done.  I needed to unload the dishwasher, and did I?  No, I browsed pinterest.  Did I upload the pictures from my camera?  No, I did some online shopping.  I told myself it was the perfect opportunity to to relax, drink my coffee and read, but instead I read celeb news online.

And I swear the moment I decided to stay up…so did she…so we will have to make this post brief.

A few years ago when we moved into the house I planted 2 bamboo trees in the front of the house.  In hopes that they would help hide the awkward blank wall.

And here is how they looked this summer.  Their height never really took off like I was hoping and so I kind of neglected them this summer, which is why they turned yellow.  I know you can see the hose on the other side of the front door, so I can’t say it was hard to water them…but somehow it was :)

So a few weekends ago, I decided it was finally time to replant.  I was waiting for Seattle’s hot spell to end before adding the new trees.

I have to say, after spending 9 months not doing any heavy lifting, it was kind of exhilarating being able to go to the home improvement store by myself knowing that I could lift the trees into the car on my own.  I felt so self reliant.  But that feeling quickly disappeared when I realized that I’m going to be flying solo on these errands for a while so Jesse can watch Lucy, and heavy lifting sucks, and it’s dirty, and then I wished Jesse was with me to do it for me.  Such a double edge sword!

Anyway, while Jesse was on the roof sweeping off moss and pine needles, I removed the bamboo and pots.  It actually took a surprising amount of time to reposition the pots.  I moved them and then had to re-level them.  I have them siting on large pavers so I was lifting the pavers, re shoveling dirt, laying the paver back down, wiggling the pot back on, finding they weren’t level, and doing it all over again.  I could barely move by the end of the day.  It felt good though, I haven’t had that feeling in a while…well I guess I couldn’t really move near the end of my pregnancy, but this was much more of a productive soreness!

So here they are!

I can’t call it an “after” shot because I still need to add some house numbers and paint the front door.  I’d like to do a brighter color on the front door.  (I guess really anything is brighter than black:) The door really needs to be taken down and sanded before getting painted, so that will have to wait until next spring.  And I am determined that my “after” shot will include nice lush green grass.  I mentioned before, our front yard used to be a gravel/dirt driveway and I’m pretty sure whichever owners added the living room decided the best thing to do would be to just let grass/weeds grow over the driveway, so it’s difficult to maintain it through the hot summer…it likes to die!

And I should add…these trees are going to look “kick A@%” this winter when I add white Christmas lights!  Can’t wait, that will make all the work worth it!

I guess that wasn’t quite as brief as I meant for it to be, turns out I’m in a rambling kind of mood!