Leaves Are Falling All Around

Day 4 - The girls had the day off school today and I had big plans for our day together - sleeping in followed by raking leaves. Of course the girls were all totally on board with my plan. There were mountains of leaves to rake since the approximately 327 trees in our yard are currently unceasingly shedding their leaves. Just kidding, I have no idea how many trees are in our yard!


It's kind of picturesque if you don't think about all the work it takes to keep the things under control.  


Our system for taking care of all the leaves was pretty inefficient. After we raked them into piles we would load up the wheelbarrow and cart them over to the woods at the edge of our property where we won't ever rake and don't care if the leaves pile up. 


If we had three or four more wheelbarrows maybe things would have gone faster, but we only have one and it was taking forever. Maybe part of the problem was that Natalie was spending more time playing than working?  Either way, after a couple of hours it was starting to feel as if we would never be finished.  Then our neighbors came out and started raking their leaves and we were the lucky beneficiaries of their wisdom and experience. 

They were raking their leaves onto a large tarp and then dragging the tarp into the woods to dump their leaves. It was brilliant!  Instead of taking three or four trips to get one pile cleared away we were able to load up a couple of piles on the tarp at one time, dramatically cutting the amount of time it took to get the leaves from their piles around the yard and to the woods.


I think we all felt as happy as Emily looks here when we were finally finished and could spend the rest of the day having fun that didn't involve leaves, or rakes, or any combination of the two.

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