"Gardening"

I couldn't sleep last night and ended up watching an hour-long show on HGTV called Designed to Sell. They went through the top 35 ways to make sure your home is ready to be put on the market - and to sell quickly and for the right price. I know we've got a while before we'll be listing our house, but the sooner we get started, the less overwhelmed we'll be. Of course, one of the first things they mentioned was Curb Appeal. Weekend before last, Will got busy with the curb appeal on our house by taking out the boxwoods in our front yard. I've got pictures of the 'before,' but the 'after' is still yet-to-come. I'm going to the nursery tomorrow to pick up our order. I'll post those pics when we're all done.

Since it was all fresh in my mind, though, the kids and I went on the hunt for some shade-loving but colorful plants for our front bed closest to the house. When we first moved in, it was filled with huge, over-grown ferns that we took out and replaced with monkey grass. It has done fine, but certainly has not filled in well enough yet. So, we found some red impatiens and spent this afternoon planting them.

BEFORE with only monkey grass (and quite the pose from Olivia).

Olivia took a few shots with the camera - I guess this would be 'DURING.' The plants are just in the spots where they will go, they're not in the ground yet.
'AFTER' with a lot of help from Olivia telling me not to freak out about the worms (Olivia: "they're good for the dirt and if we see one in the sun, Mrs. Hoyos said we have to move it to the shade"). McIver was plenty of help, too! It looks a lot less sparse - we'll see what happens.

For the record, "gardening" is in quotation marks!