Weeding and more.....

 Recently we have had fun reading about Edna St. Vincent Millay and we enjoyed reading some of her poems. This little short one I had heard years ago quoted in a book (The Keeper of the Bees) and I have been feeling like it applies to our life lately:

"My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -

It gives a lovely light!"

We have been generally getting enough sleep but when we are awake it feels a bit like life is going at a faster pace than I can keep up with. I am working on just taking each hour as it comes and figuring out what things can wait until later.

 We have still been working on our project of helping to make our world beautiful in the ways that we can. I have not however been doing a very good job of taking pictures every day and most of our beautifying projects have not been specially planned things put rather picking up trash, pulling up weeds and doing stuff like that wherever we may be- either home or away.

  Here are some pictures of the last week or so that I did happen to take....

Aaron mowing our lawn. This was his first time and he worked very hard at it and thought it was quite fun.

 Jonathan on the lake shore. This picture doesn't really show our beautifying - but we did pick up some trash while we were out on a family bike ride.

 On Sunday evening we had a fun casual evening of playing things like volleyball, basketball and other games at the church building. I was feeling rather tired so I didn't play any games but I had fun spending time with 2 sweet little one year olds. While they played in the sand box (and ate sand) I worked at pulling up the persistent crab grass that gets into our play area at the church building.

 Mara pulling weeds in one of our perennial gardens. Below I am standing by the now weeded flowerbed. I need to figure out how to improve this flower bed - we do have a lot of plants in it but the soil is so sandy that many of them don't thrive the way I would like them too- I am trying to figure out if there is a way I can fix this problem without pulling them all out and exchanging the soil.

 Jonathan helped me weed one of the landscaped areas at the church building.

Megan with some bags of trash that we picked up while walking on our road.

 This project is a good reminder to me that while we might not always be able to do something big to make our world look nicer- we can even when busy doing something small like pick up a piece of trash when we see it or pull a weed that is choking our some flowers.

 Are you busy this time of year too? What is going on in your life?