Our Christmas present from my parents was a tree for our yard. We picked it out a couple of weeks ago and it was delivered and planted this afternoon. It's an ornamental crabapple that will have pretty pink blossoms in the spring.



It makes our yard look so grown-up.

We've been busy. After a trip out to the nursery and another to Canadian Tire we spent most of last night and this afternoon playing with plants and dirt.


I've got boxes of flowers along our front deck. My sister, Jane, and I grew the sweet peas and morning glories from seed and then picked up a few more plants to fill things out.


Rob put together our new lawn mower and cleaned up our front lawn. It still needs a good drink but looks so much tidier. That's got to be the fastest possible way to get rid of dandelions.


Two big half barrels (in an awesome yellow) are now hanging out next to the tomatoes Jane gave me. In a few weeks they'll start to show the tops of carrots.


Abby stayed outside with us the whole time we were working. She had a lot of fun chasing bugs and chewing the assembly instructions for the lawn mower but got pretty hot being in the sun for so long.


We were feeling the heat too so, along with an ice cube for Abby, I got some lemonade and cherries out of the fridge. We enjoyed them while admiring our handiwork.

Yesterday marks our first anniversary in this house. It's incredible to think we have been here a whole year. It feel so different now that it did when we moved in.

Oh ... and I got some yarn ... from the nursery.

Yep. I was walking around looking for someone to tell us what the tree we were looking at was, turned a corner in the shop and discovered a nice little display of Knit Picks yarns and needles and some good looking knitting books. It's just to the right of the seed potatoes.

I wanted to get some - to show support for their endeavour you know - and saw the basket of pima cotton at the bottom of the display. The blue and green were so nice and summery and I instantly thought of the Classic Washcloth in The Knitter's Book of Yarn. I scrounged up some needles and cast-on after dinner.


It's so soft!

We can now cook outside.

Rob brought home our first barbeque on Friday afternoon and spent the evening putting it together. He was sternly reprimanded by our squirrel for getting to close to the peanuts and was a source of complete fascination for Abby. So much so that this happened:


Rob called me outside once everything was ready to go and we both watched as a collection of little blue flames lit up the inside of our (very shiny) barbeque. It was really pretty exciting. Rob went out to get stuff to cook after that and came back with everything needed for both hot dogs and banana boats.


We stood outside and watched them cook (banana boats aren't all that exciting to watch but it was nice to be outside anyway). We brought Abby out with us and I let her explore the wilderness at the back of the yard. Rob called us to go back inside when he figured the bananas were hot.


I know a banana boat doesn't look great but it smells and tastes fantistic - all warm and gooey and full of mini marshmallows and Reese's Pieces and Smarties. It was so lovely to be eating food we'd barbequed ourselves. Meal planning for the week is now so much more exciting and full of all sorts of things we don't usually bother to cook because they are really only good when barbequed.

A barbeque is also a great excuse for having friends over and that's what we did last night. It was so fun and summery to all be standing on the back deck and smelling steaks cooking on the fire.


Everyone brought something and we had so many yummy things to eat. We did make one important discovery though: we've added a door onto the back deck to our list of future home renovations - walking all the way around the side of the house to get something you can see through the window gets annoying really quickly (especially when one staircase is broken and you have to go to the far one).