Yem-nade and trains

There’s a woman we know from our church who lives nearby a set of train tracks.  The train passes through every morning at about the same time.  We can often hear the whistle blow if we have the windows open in our house.  Earlier in the summer, Jake told the kids that he would talk to Ms. B and see if they could come visit and watch the trains and have a glass of lemonade.  Well, it only took telling them this once.  They continue to remind us that this is something we need to do before the summer ends.  What I love the most about this though, is the way Lincoln says the word “lemonade.”  It’s “yem-nade.”  Makes me smile every time I hear him say it!

Goodbye trees

The weekend we were up north, a strong storm blew through the area.  We had one tree casualty in the backyard that caught in another tree and also lost a couple of significantly sized branches off another.  (The largest branch apparently fell on the shed and swing set.  Our wonderful neighbors took it down and cut it up before we arrived back home.)  Because of the size of the trees in our backyard, we had to hire someone to come and remove the broken one.  And since they were already going to be in the backyard (and there would be a mess of some sort anyway) we had an arborist look at the other trees to see if any others needed to also be removed.   All total, we had 5 trees taken down.  Watching the crew of 3 guys work was crazy!  The boys and I camped out in the front yard and watched them work – they loved to see what was going on.  One by one, the 5 trees were no more.  They finished things off with a stump grinder and then cleaned up the majority of the mess.  By the end of the day (they worked 12 hours) we had a totally different backyard.  The amount of light that the 5 trees kept out of the yard was pretty significant.  It’s going to take a little while to get used to the new and improved sunny backyard we now have.