NIMBY

I think it would be accurate to describe Husband's preoccupation with the landscaping of our backyard as a full-blown obsession now. He's been spending evenings after the kids have gone to bed researching dry wells, dry creeks, pond-building, and storm water on-line. He wakes up at night and can't get back to sleep for wondering what the hell could be causing our backyard to be so full of water. He even rented an extremely expensive, ornery and vicious-looking piece of machinery for the entire weekend--his birthday weekend!--so that he could spend all his daylight hours trenching through the quicksand-like mud, hauling dirt from one spot to another, and moving one of the 2 enormous piles of gravel that are still blocking the top of our driveway and easy ingress through the side door.

Sigh. It is too wearying for me to get involved anymore. After the landscaper came, built the retaining wall, and left again I assumed that it was time to begin the fun of planting. I moved around some lavender plants to a better location, I bought a whole bunch of spring-flowering items, and I even got to work extending a stone-lined pathway around the corner of the porch with all the rocks left over from the retaining wall. This is when Husband began realizing that the yard needed FAR more work than he thought and pretty much all my little projects were destroyed. The stone-lined path was plowed through so that Husband could excavate yet another drainage trench and make the gravel in the path a whole lot deeper. He plans to put a rain garden right where the drought-loving lavender bed is now located. There's a foot of mud on top of 100 spring-flowering bulbs as well as the bare, and therefore invisible, branches of a hydrangea bush. Again, sigh.

I am literally just trying not to look at the backyard anymore, much less think about it. I have instead begun painting the kitchen and dining room inside the house. I'm managing to get a wall at a time done during naptimes and while the girls are sleeping. It will be beautiful, the exact color of Breyer's coffee ice cream or a milky cafe au lait.

But painting ain't gardening. I'll be glad when this is all over.