And That Was Our Saturday

We had a Saturday a week ago that had precious little lined up in the way of activities for the day.

Oh, how I love a day like that!

They are too rare!

Monte decided to get the weed eater out to feast upon the yard.

Shortly thereafter he informed me,

"I blew the string."

Not sure this is the official term for running out of string or just fouling it up in some way.

So off he went to the hardware store.

He was gone awhile.

Long enough for him to miss the girls as they walked outside looking like this:

They announced that they wanted to play croquet.

Oh my, I love croquet! 

I come from a long line of competitive croquet players.

I guess my grandfather would lie on the ground to better line up his shots.

My mother? Well, let's just say it got ugly on the croquet court at Fripp Island one year. 

She may have made a small boy cry who asked if he could join our game.

The girls apparently thought they had grown up in turn of the century New England 

and felt the need to dress up for the game.

Fine by me, I was happy to watch from the hammock where I had stationed myself with a book.

Except they kept

I don't think so, McDaniel!

wanting

their

pictures

taken!!

I finally put my foot down

for the love of Pete

and told them to get the game of croquet started.

So I could get back to my book.

They took my phone

and took a few pictures

This is downright arty.

of their own.

I must have failed them somewhere because they didn't use the croquet wickets that came with the set but some leftover garden border fencing.

For the love of Pete!

The dog insisted on being apart of the game.

He looks like he might be lying down on the ground eyeing McDaniel's shot much like my grandfather.

Or it was just a ploy to get the ball.

The girls' version of croquet involved a "timeout" chair.

No, I could not be bothered to get up to take this photo.

I'd had it.

Time out over.

They decided to take a break and make some homemade Arnold Palmer's (half-lemonade, half-ice tea) yet they decided to throw in raspberries and a fair amount of sugar.

This is the moment Ellie realized their concoction 

should not be ingested.

Then Monte comes home 

• with a new wireless weed eater

• a wireless hedge clipper 

• and something called a Jaw Saw.

Happy Father's Day to him!

What you are missing about the Jaw Saw in this picture is that when you pull the trigger

a chain saw shoots out of the middle of the jaw part.

I wondered if maybe Monte had made this out of odds and ends in our basement when I was trying to read/photograph the girls ruining the game of croquet and the original recipe of an Arnold Palmer.

He said he did not.

And that it was the safest chain saw on the market.

And it wouldn't be like "before".

The "before" meaning when I was 9 months pregnant and it was 118 degrees in July and Monte borrowed our neighbor's chainsaw to "trim"our two evergreen trees on either side of our house and then called me outside to show me that he had massacred anything and everything that had ever grown green in our yard.

Massacred it dead 
and left it in a pile so large that I couldn't see the street.

It wasn't a happy time at our house.

Later he went and bought his own chain saw and then proceeded to "blow a tooth" on it within the first 30 seconds of using/owning it.

My mom refers to the incident as "God's provision".

Monte wasted no time. He needed to try out the Jaw Saw on our front yard Bradford Pear immediately.

I actually had to get up out of the hammock 

to point to which branches needed to be trimmed 

and to make sure the Jaw Saw was the safest chain saw on the market. 

It did not take long to get results.

Yet we had this to deal with.

Not to worry, Monte assured me, Jaw Saw in hand.

He trimmed all those branches into small pieces that we could either burn in the fire pit or put in a land refuse bag for the city to take on garbage day.

And that was our Saturday.

And we are buying a Jaw Saw for my dad.