More Neighborhood RR & the Yard & Remodeling

So, here I am again at home with another sick child! Curren came down with the same thing Jessie had last week! Poor kids. So, he is hopefully on the mend after last night. I can only hope. I feel so bad for him. We spent some time outside in the backyard today to get some fresh air. I hope it helped him he seemed to enjoy the sunshine a lot! He put on his swim trunks and had his feet in the water for awhile. All of my flower bushes are in bloom and it smells so good outside :) You can see my two rose bushes and then my big Gardenia bush on the far right in full bloom, it's so tall, I just love that bush!

Here's a closeup of the Gardenia bush.

Then I am plugging away on the NRR, I like is so far. My little tree on the middle left is kind of ugly... I wanted to have a sort of weeping willow. But I don't think it turned out that way :P So I think I'll fill it in a bit more. I made a cow down on the fence too, I hope she turned out alright :D It's hard not having a chart to go off of. You know me, I like to make things hard when they don't have to be :D

Mark has been working on updating the house a little. First we bought some paint to do the living room, then he decided he wanted to tear out the current fireplace and put in a real mantle. So he had to do that... then we will have to tear out all of the old trim and baseboard so it'll match the new fireplace... LOL! Can you see the domino effect here :D So here is what it formerly looked like:

And now:

I love it now! I'll get some more pictures of it when we get the new trim up. You can see we painted the top part of the wall a khaki color, and bottom part blue. We'll put a chair rail to seperate the two colors and redo the trim around the windows white. It should look pretty nice when it's all done. :) We got that huge mirror to put above the fireplace, it's like 5' x 4'! It was a monster to hang up too, but we got it. I keep waiting for the whole wall to fall down from the weight of it :D