Backyard Update

Months ago the sprinklers in charge of watering the top half of our lawn gave up the ghost. The ensuing months have not been pretty. Imagine dead grass. Or in lieu of imagining, look at this picture:

Eventually, Eric found time to tackle the problem (after I hounded him about it for a few months). It ended up being quite a big problem that required quite a lot of part replacement. And quite a lot of mud:

But it worked!

After 3 weeks the grass has made a comeback:

(As an aside, whenever I hear the word comeback I automatically think of LL Cool J's song "Mama Said Knock You Out", which if you are totally cool like me you know starts with the lyrics, "Don't call it a comeback.")

Anyone else?

Anyway, these next pictures show the grass in a sad state, but you can rest easily knowing the problem has been fixed!

Now if you know me, you know that I am not a gun person. I am all for gun control (gasp!), and don't find them particularly interesting. However, our favorite family activity as of late, is shooting the BB gun in the backyard. Life is full of contradictions!

We set up little army men, soda cans, and targets and then have various competitions.

Eric always wins:

But the rest of us are pretty good too:

Even Sadie Baby, who pretty much aims and fires in under 3 seconds, but still almost always manages to hit the target:

Hollywood Or Bust!

Recently the kids and I took a trip to Hollywood!

The new Hollywood pool in Las Vegas!

We swam in the little lazy river:

And of course went down the slides:

Such good friends:

Kim don't you ever even think about moving! Jackson and Carson have to be friends forever!

It was quite a fun outing. Luckily is wasn't that busy, so the wait time on the slides was minimal and the pool area never felt crowded. Plus it was cheap (always a selling point in my book!). I want to go back next week. Anyone up for it?

Fletcher Canyon

Last, last weekend we hiked up Fletcher Canyon on Mt. Charleston. It is about 4 miles round-trip.

We started out strong! Sadie threw her first in the air and declared, "I'm never giving up!"



The same can't be said of Megan who faded quickly. The girl seems to have some sort of mental block when it comes to hiking. Check out her face:



No matter that she can swim for a solid hour without stopping, when it comes to hiking she looks like she is going to take her last breath 10 minutes in. She recovered and managed to smile soon after we entered the shaded, somewhat jungle looking area:



Eventually we made it to the rocky, walled canyon portion of the hike:



We stopped to check out some rocks:



And take some sp's:



We finally made it to the top! During the spring, summer and winter, water runs out of this rock:




On the way down we stopped to walk along this fallen log:



The hike took us quite a while (4 hours!!). For reference the sign when we started said it was a one and half hour hike. Granted, we did stop to play and certainly took our time. But still!