365 Days Later

When we first moved to Toronto (a year ago today!), we moved into our house pretty much site unseen. We saw a few pictures but they were in the middle of renovating so it was hard to see what it actually looked like and a friend went and saw it for us. We thought it would do the trick and it was a decent deal but the one thing we wanted fixed before we moved in was the yard - it was a mess! Actually, I don't think 'mess' quite describes the disaster zone it was at the time.

Unfortunately, it didn't happen last summer so this summer we've been determined to have a yard we can enjoy and where Daija can plan. We've been working on it and now, 365 days later, we have a yard!

This is what it looked like to begin with (and this was already after we cleaned up all the junk back there...)

Nolana spent countless hours out there yanking weeds and tilling the soil and often Daija was out there helping.

Daija would collect the rocks, play with the worms so they didn't get lonely and keep Mommy company. Some of the time Daija wasn't so much 'helping' as just rolling around in the dirt...

Eventually, we got it to the point where it looked like this.

We sectioned off the one side for a little vegetable garden where Nolana is growing a few varieties of tomatoes, lettuce, aragula, some other salad greens, cucumber, beans, zucchini, sweet peppers and some snow peas that aren't doing so good at this point.


Daija loves being able to go out and help water the plants with her little watering can. Sometimes Mommy likes to be able to go out and water Daija....

Yesterday, I went and picked up a truckload of sod and dirt and Nolana and I got it all laid down. Now we have a yard!

While it's nothing fancy, we can now spend some summer evenings out there BBQing. Daija can run around and play (we're hoping to get a little sandbox) and it all feels just a little nicer than before. It only took us a year....