Work has been blissfully, rear end-kickingly, busy, and the weekends have been the same! We’re in full-tilt get ready for spring planting mode in the garden. We recently had to buy dirt online, and if all goes well we’ll be putting seedlings in the ground this weekend!

You’ll note from the pictures, Phil spent pretty much all last weekend outside. Part of it he spent rolling around in the compost heap. I promise he doesn’t have a hairy back at 18 months. I also promise that if he did, I’d exploit it for our family’s financial gain on Maury Povich.

Here’s a funny story about dirt, folks. A couple of weekends ago, I did some weeding. Lots of weeding. Crazy amounts of weeding. And I realized the dirt in our front planters, quite honestly, sucked to work in. It’s all hard, and clay, and weeding it is like pulling teeth. Since there’s oodles of room in the planters, we decided to buy better dirt online to put in there on top of the old stuff.

I wondered if I could buy bags of dirt from Lowes online and just have it delivered so there’d be less heavy lifting. Once Josh and I started figuring out just how much dirt we needed, it became pretty obvious that we were going to need to do this thing on a much larger scale.

I did a bit of online research, and found www.soildirect.com – for a reasonable price, I was able to set up a dirt delivery to Long Beach for Saturday morning.

Stay with me, it’s about to get hilarious up in here.

So Saturday morning rolls around, and Soil Direct shows up in front of our house with a huge dump truck full of fabulous new dirt for our planters. Josh was at work, and I walked out to meet the truck driver with Phil on my hip.

“So it’s just going in this planter over here and that one over there,” I tell him casually. Naively. Completely unaware of the dirt-digging extravaganza I was about to embark on.

He looks at my kind of confused, and says  there’s nothing on his paperwork about having to help move the dirt.

“Um… I didn’t know I had to specify that on the online order form,” I tell him. “What do I do? I’m kind of all by myself…”

And then I offered him twenty bucks to help me, and he sort of kind of guffawed and said no can do, this would take hours without a wheelbarrow.

And then he dumped a 6ft wide by 6ft long by 4ft tall mound of dirt on my curb.

And I sort of pooped myself.

“What the heck am I gonna do with that?” was the first thing that went through my mind.

But then I got smart, scrounged up a few more bucks, and asked the triplets that live next door if they’d wanna make 20 bucks a piece shoveling dirt with me. So the three of them, along with their grandpa, helped me move this huge pile of dirt for the next 4 hours. Their grandpa even wrangled a wheelbarrow from one of our other neighbors.

If I had to shovel that whole huge mound alone, I’m pretty sure I’d still be at it today.

We live in a really awesome friendly neighborhood, guys. Hope you do, too!