Traditions Ball, Robotics Class, Dr. Seuss Week, and the yard

Here are some other things that have been happening in our family in the last month.

The elementary had Dr. Seuss week as they do each year.  The boys were all decked out for Wacky Wednesday, so I took this picture.  Another favorite day was Crazy Sock Day.

Cherilyn went with Jaron to the BYU Traditions Ball.  The Ball was in the Hinckley building.  Cherilyn said it was really fancy.  Grandma Elder adjusted this prom dress for Cherilyn and she loved wearing it.

Ethan and Eli paricipated in an after-school robotics class.  They thought it would be fun and Ethan earned the Robotics merit badge for participating.  In the class they learned how to program a robot to do certain tasks.  For the showcase, they "drove" their robot through an obstacle course, where it had to turn corners, turn around and lift something up.

Here is their robot.

Here are the boys with their robot.

We decided to transform the lower area of our yard.  It was originally a play area with a swingset and slide.  When we took those out we moved our shed down there.  After we got Jake, our dog, that area was his and it looked like it, with various chewed up toys and branches scattered around. The first part of April, we decided to move the shed up by the garage door, which makes more sense for storing outside tools and the lawnmower.  After some discussion of what to do with the area, we decided to put in a garden.  (The boys liked the idea of a pool, but they were overruled.)   To start the process, we, meaning mostly Charles, dug a sprinkler trench through our rocks, or is it dirt?  We borrowed a pick to make the process a little easier.  We did this in between sessions of  Saturday's General Conference.  That week we had 14 yards of dirt delivered.  It was a large mound of black dirt covering a large part of the driveway.  Charles rented a Kubota backhoe to move the dirt to the back.  It saved us a lot of shoveling and pushing of the wheelbarrow.  Eli and I, worked at leveling out the dirt that Charles dumped over the wall.  The dirt piled to the top of the wall so Charles came down and helped shovel and rake the dirt across the area.  Joshua and his friends also helped for a few minutes.  When we had the dirt off the driveway and leveled out, Charles used the backhoe to dig a hole for another tree.  With the backhoe it took about half an hour.  The last hole for a tree we dug, took five hours because of all the rocks. When we were done, it looked good and Charles, Eli, and I were worn out.  On Saturday the girls and I bought a chokecherry tree and some strawberry plants, while the boys were working on sprinklers.  We got the tree and strawberries planted and then rested. The next weekend we went to the nursery, and loaded up two carts with over 40 plants.  We layed out the plants where we thought they would do the best and then planted.  We had a process set up -- Charles dug the hole, I spread out the roots, Eli poured on root stuff and Ethan helped fill in the hole.  It was satisfying to have all those new plants in.  We look forward to when they fill in the area.

 We also moved the rocks from this area at the back of the house, under the apple tree.  We filled in that area with more dirt and new plants.