How Awesome Is This?

I love looking out of my windows that face the backyard. I our backyard no matter the weather, even when it’s gloomy and cold. No matter how cold it is outside, you can always find at least a dozen big birds walking around our lawn looking for bread crumbs that Mark throws out to them.

Now that it is warmer and greener, I enjoy going outside into my backyard a lot more. This is our first (and possibly the last) spring here so I am trying to soak in its beauty. The garden is so vast that it almost like getting a breath of fresh air when you go out there. No cars, no noise, no people—it is quite challenging to play hide-and-seek there.

One of our family home evening activities this month was having a bonfire. In our backyard. I believe this was the attempt #4 to burn the branches and weeds that our gardener had been throwing into a huge pile since last November. Somehow it was always too moist for all the leaves to catch fire. This particular time, we managed to burn 99% of our pile! The conditions were just right and the fire kept going. We also had s’mores on one of the non-flaming side of the bonfire and kids, of course, loved it.

Later we found out that officially we are not allowed to have light a fire in our backyard until dark in case other people still have their laundry hanging outside. Yes, we saw a lot of leaf ashes floating in the sky…hopefully no one’s laundry got ruined.