My Manly Men

Now that our pine trees are gone, we've been working on our front bank. It took several weekends just to get all the pine straw and mulch raked up. Then we got our free trees from the city, and it was planting day. Gene had injured his left wrist the day before, so he was handicapped this day. Which was unfortunate, because there was a lot of work to do--much more than we expected. You see, those pine trees had been growing on that bank for many, many years. And the root system was unbelievable. And, of course, we seemed to pick the worst places to plant our baby trees.

Thankfully, Ryan came over. To be honest, I wasn't expecting him to be much help (sorry, Rye), because he's never really been one to do manual labor. But, he surprised us both this day. It really seemed like he was enjoying doing "manly" work. And, it turns out he was A LOT of help. If he hadn't come over, those trees would probably still not be planted.

So here are some photos of the long, HOT day.

Ryan started on what we thought was going to be the easiest tree to plant. Here's my baby boy using an ax to chop the roots in the hole where we wanted to plant our Little Gem Magnolia tree. It's hard to believe that this is the same little boy who used to spend hours on end in his room playing his Nintendo or drawing. When we told him we were thinking of adopting a child, he said he didn't want us to get a boy because the kid would probably expect him to play sports with him or something.

And look at him now.

This is what he had been chopping!

And here's the tree all planted!

Dakota was monitoring our resident gopher for us. She could not think about anything else all day.

Here's Gene chopping with one hand.

The Southern Magnolia on the left side was the easiest hole to dig, because no pine trees had been growing up on this side.

See, nice empty hole!

Four down! One to go.

Did I mention that it was REALLY hot?!

We saved the worst for last. We thought this Southern Magnolia was never going to get planted.

And this is why. . .

Daylight started to fade. But they were determined to get it planted.

And Dakota was determined to find that gopher!

They finally resorted to using the reciprocating saw. Check this thing out!

As the sun was going down, they were still working. We had to use a flashlight to finish. But they did finish! And now all our trees are planted. After we get a few other things done, I'll take more pictures. But it still looks pretty bad right now, so it will have to wait.

Thank you, Ryan! You're the best son in the whole world!