Croquet Golf

I wanted this Croquet Golf set as a wedding gift...we even had it on our registry. No one got it for us (maybe they thought getting married in December, we wouldn't have a use for it). Well, we ended up buying it with a gift card we got. That was back in Dec. 1999. The years pass by and it's June 2012 and FINALLY it gets opened!!!  The first summer we were married, I was recovering from a miscarriage and just never got it out...then we moved. The next summer, we just didn't think about it. The next summer we had little Joshua...it got moved around in the garage over the years, then put in storage when we moved up here. When we moved into our trailer a few months ago, and redid our storage unit, we put it to the front thinking it would be fun to do for family home eveing some week. A few weeks later, Joshua had his friend Calvin over to spend the night, and knowing that Calvin probably wasn't going to want to sit in our hot trailer and watch a movie or something, I grabbed it from storage. The kids loved it!! My kids hadn't really played croquet before, but Cal had. My boys have both minature golfed, plus Joshua likes regular golf. It was fun. Now that we're getting ready to move again, we'll still have a big back yard and they will enjoy it there as well.

Pouting for some reason...she's perfected that look.

Go nathaniel!! 
(see all the blackberry bushes in the back behind Joshua...they're getting ripe now...picked 8 pounds yesterday)

the back of our trailer...flag from the museum (still want to call it the library...that's where it was when I was a kid)

Our flowers...

We finally got around to doing some yard work. Brian got our front "yard" (it's not big) mowed and then one morning, I started weeding the flower bed. It had some tulips and a daffodil blooming when we moved it, then there were a few iris. There have been lupin blooming for the past few weeks. I'd bought some petunias on clearance at the store, and wanted to get them planted before the blankety-blank dogs from around the corner got to them...or the raccoon. The kids all wanted to pick out some flowers too, so we walked across the street to the store and Joshua picked out some marigolds - yellow ones, surprise. Nathaniel whatever he could find that was orange (violas...there were some yellow ones too) and Grace, of course, went with purple (more violas, with some white ones). We all worked hard that morning and were so happy with the end results.