who said gardening is relaxing???

today began better than yesterday. claudia woke up on the right side of the bed (thank god!) and the weather, although overcast, was fine enough to walk lili to school. we are so lucky to live one street away from school and more often than not we take the 'long' way home which pleases me because we have a lovely view of the mountains from the top of our street. every now and then we run into an older couple leaving their home and the old man is so very friendly, the kind of man that restores your faith in our world. today he had a little chat with claudia about her umbrella and then reached into his pocket and pulled out two gold coins, one for her and one for mia! how nice, we recently met our back door neighbour and he has since been leaving little parcels of home grown goodies like mandarins, oranges and jaboica (cross between grape and lychee) we cut some bird of paradise flowers for our back door neighbour and took some jasmine up the road to our newest best neighbour.

anyhow back to my title, today i started to clear the overgrown patch where 'jane' will eventually reside (read my previous blog to get up to date)

this is the spot i have great dreams for and had a bit of a start on today, but of course i had my little 'apprentices' with me squabbling with each other, pulling out things i wanted to keep, dropping dirt on my head... needless to say i wasnt feeling relaxed!

they on the other hand loved spending that time with me and after a little while claduia wanted to stop and play. i had to follow her inside where we sat in front of the little people toys and lined them up. i didnt know we had 35 little people toys!!

the next two photos speak volumes one person is intense the other looks defeated (can you guess which person looks defeated)

we had a great time playing with the toys until my poor back could not spend one more second on the ground. before we moved off CLAUDIA took this photo, pretty impressive seeing that she wasnt even looking at the screen!!

tomorrow is another day and a few weeds closer to success. wish me luck and pray that some sort of distraction takes my girls away from me for a wee while (yeh right as if thats going to happen, the queen could visit and they would still want to be with me, the wiggles on the other hand...)

mmwah rosey