Seasonal Happenings (including SNOW!)

The other day, Julia came home from school and announced that she was headed to the back yard to rake leaves.  I thought this was a strange proclamation; she is NOT one to offer to do chores of any kind.  I then realized that her motivation was purely selfish...she planned to JUMP into the pile she created.  Whatever!  As long as she was going to get most of the leaves into one place, I wasn't going to question the motivation.

Yes, she's wearing shorts....in the cold weather.  (Don't ask, I'm sure she has a ridiculous explanation!)  Anyway, this is the before picture.  Here's the after shot below...........

Yesterday, she and her dad raked up all the leaves in the yard (for real this time).  Julia was used as a "compacting device".  After Dad filled the garbage can with leaves, he would pick Julia up and put her atop the can full of leaves and hold her as she jumped up and down, smashing the leaves further into the can.  After that, they climbed up on the roof and put up Christmas lights.  I was SO excited.  I love having the lights up on the outside of the house (it gives the illusion that the WHOLE house is Christmas-ready, even though it's NOT!)

Yep, she's now wearing a bike helmet.  That's just in case she falls off the roof. (Like that will REALLY help anything!)

While those two were "up on the housetop", Jourdan and I were finishing the annual dahlia dig-up.  You probably enjoyed all the pictures of his beautiful flowers earlier in the fall (late summer) on our blog.  This is the behind the scenes work that goes on at the end of each season.  It takes a full day to plant them and two days to dig the tubers up, wash them, let them dry, label them, divide them, and store them in peat moss for the winter.  It's a huge process....when Jourdan leaves on his mission, I'm not sure who's going to take care of his precious plants.  (And yes, I realize that I have over 6 more years  before he's 19, but this is a HUGE task, so I do spend time worrying about it.)

He has over 45 varieties of dahlias, but unfortunately, he lost many of them to the soggy spring we had.  The only good side to that was that there are fewer to dig up and take care of.  So imagine this mess taking up double the space in our garage.  After all of that, he planted all his tulips and hyacinths for the spring.

And, to top off our "exciting" weekend, we had SNOW today.  It's really early for valley floor snow here.  Since we don't usually get too much snow in a season, it was really exciting.  The flakes were big, beautiful and fluffy.  They fell for a couple of hours, before stopping.  Within a few hours, it was all gone - it was fun while it lasted though.

The small amount of snow we got was not enough to deter Julia from making a snowman, albeit a tiny one.  We didn't even have a carrot for his nose, so she used celery - it's pathetic, I know, but it made her happy for 10 minutes.

She even made a snow/mud angel in the front yard.  (And yes, my house is a total muddy mess.  AND it's Sunday, so I'll have to look at it until tomorrow morning!)

The snow made having Christmas lights up even more exciting.  Here's to winter...my 3rd favorite season!  And to being done with the dahlias (and tulips) until spring.