Easter puppy

For her Easter present, Riley went for a long hike.

As you can see from her smile, she enjoyed herself.

She spent her walk doing a lot of hunting...not for Easter eggs, though. Luckily, she didn't find anything.

She also took the opportunity to engage in one of her favorite past times--swimming.

Overall, it was a great spring day. And the exhausted puppy at the end of it wasn't too bad, either.

Swimming lessons

This past weekend we took Riley to the local state park to teach her to swim. The park was gorgeous.

Riley wasn't quite sure what to think of the water at first, but she warmed to it after a while. Unfortunately, because she's such a speedy little thing, the pictures did not turn out very well. But here is one of her swimming in the creek:


And other of her checking out the river rocks, which she found quite fascinating.

We think she'll become a big swimmer in the long run. After all, she already has the Ariel pose down to an art.(can you tell how big she's gotten? she's like doubled in size!)

I've been a very bad blogger and haven't updated the blog in awhile. But that was only because we have been so busy and hard at work. The most obvious illustration of our efforts is the backyard. It has made a drastic change from overgrown and slightly jungle-y to sleek and clean. Ok, maybe not that sleek and clean yet (because all the cutting and trimming left a lot of newly exposed brown spots) but it will be once all our efforts reach fruition. Unfortunately, I don't have good comparison before pictures, but here are some pictures that might give you an idea of our progress.

Our backyard before purchase of the house:


A mid-way picture from the early spring with some cleanup.


And now...
Did you notice the sudden lack of gigantic bushes between the trees? How about the fact that our yard now looks twice as big?

We also did some trimming up around the house.

No more tree branches growing in front of the guest bedroom windows. And no more 6 foot high bush with razor sharp leaves. We, of course, plan to plant new, better plant life around the patio. But for now, I'm just enjoying the pristine lack of overgrown plant life.

Oh, yeah. And here is Riley helping us with yard work.

She is very adept at helping us clean up the empty bags of top soil.


Well, I hope you enjoyed this update. I'll try to do better this coming holiday weekend.

Bloomin' excited

Ok, so most of the excitement around here revolves around there being only 3 days until we pick up Riley!!! But, there is also some excitement over what mystery plants are emerging from the large amounts of mulch around the house. By the time we bought the house in October, most of the plants had retreated back into the ground (or we forgot about them during the winter). So every week now we are finding new and interesting plants popping up. This weeks plants include the following:

Hostas, in alternating colors.

Mystery plant with cool little pods.

Woody bush with red flowers (and yes, that's its official name).
A white flower we found in the woods.

Ok, so we have no idea what any of our plants are (besides the hostas). If you know, feel free to leave a comment. Otherwise, I may begin naming them on my own...

Spring is here

It was over 70 degrees today! After all the rain we've had lately, we couldn't wait to get outside. We spent the morning raking, trimming and generally cleaning up the yard. I waged a full scale offensive against a ridiculously over grown bush near our patio. The bush won... Its leaves were razor sharp, which I didn't realize until I'd finished. The bush left so many cuts and nicks on my arms that at first I thought I had a rash. Awesome.