James spent a lot of time outside this weekend.  Cleaning up leaves, brush, fixing things, mowing . . .

I spend about ten minutes outside at a time, mainly walking around aimlessly, doing one or two small tasks before I retreat back inside because being just about thirty weeks pregnant is exhausting without even doing anything.  I’m sitting here typing, and I can barely breathe because my lungs don’t have quite as much room as they used to.  There’s a nice brief twelve week break between your first trimester and your last trimester that are basically the fun, “cute”, enjoyable part of pregnancy.  And the rest is just ugly.  And uncomfortable.

So back to our yard.  We have a large front yard, and a busy backyard and about a million things we’d like to fix and change.  This weekend, we found ourselves talking about how we would spend a hundred thousand dollars if we had a hundred thousand dollars to blow–the list seemed to go on and on–build an addition above the garage/kitchen area, get a new roof (because our current one is peeling), put vinyl siding on the house, get a new fence (because our current one is falling over in a ton of places), redo the front landscaping area, redo the front walkway and make a front patio and porch, redo the back deck, fix the pool storage area, put new concrete around the pool (because the current concrete is all cracked) and landscape the pool area, etc, etc, etc.  We get stuck in the middle between trying to be content with what we have, and dreaming about what could be.  We see our neighbors with beautiful yards and landscaping and have friends with the same–and then we have to remind ourselves to be content.  We are all in different stages of life.  And right now, it’s not a stage where we can make these things come to fruition.  So we remain stuck in the middle–we can dream–but we also need to be content with where we are.  Right here and right now.  It’s a tough challenge!