Crazy Balls and Mud Pies

Have I described how much I love our backyard? It is the perfect backyard.  And by perfect I do not mean perfectly manicured. It has weeds galore. But it is perfect for our family. It is fenced, flat and not too fussy. At one point it was nicely landscaped so there are still flowers in every season and fruit trees. It retains some its former glory but it is slowly reverting to its natural state. The boys, no doubt, are hastening this process. They throw “mud bombs” down onto the basketball court, they re-routed the flagstone path according to their own whimsy, dismantled part of the dry-laid retaining wall, and dug up some old irrigation lines. [Did I mention how much I LOVE renting!! I hope our landlords don’t blogstalk us…I’m doing my best, I just can’t watch them ALL the time.] They have a booming mudworks construction operation with all their diggers, dumptrucks and backhoe loaders.  They have several excavation efforts underway, too. I think they are building a quarry.

Now that the days are longer we spend most evenings hanging out in the backyard. Ryan and the boys invented a game called “crazy balls.” The object of the game is to hit all the balls (tennis balls, footballs, whiffleballs, basketballs, soccer balls, etc) into the hula hoop with croquet mallets. It replaced “dingleballs” (aka “red-neck golf”, a.k.a.  the “bonk-on-the-head-game”)  as our backyard game of choice since Elliot  kept bonking himself in the head with that game.

I have to go to bed since I re-committed (just this morning!!) not to stay up late. I am in the middle of a great book and a huge DIY project so it’s been very tempting to stay up late. I would write more about our backyard fun but here are some pictures and an open invitation to come visit and hang out with us in the backyard and experience it yourself.

          Our neighbors have a plum tree that hangs over into our yard. Tonight I gave Anwoo his first taste of plum…he ate the whole thing. I was reminded of an image from Ann Lamott’s book Operating Instructions in how she describes the first time her son ate a plum he slowly pushed the peel back out of his mouth like a dollar bill being rejected from a vending machine. I really like that image and was tempted to see what Anwoo would do with the peel but reasoned that he might choke on it so I didn’t let him try it.