War on the Shrubbery

It has literally been World War III in my back yard for about two weeks, and this weekend, I prevailed.  This is a picture of our back yard last fall before we moved in. 

Notice the row of shrubs on the right side of the back porch.  These shrubs have prevented me from getting a clear view of the kids playing in the back yard while I'm in the kitchen, so I decided we should probably remove them.  My first thought was to have Daddy do it, but the last thing I wanted was to put that on his to-do list for a weekend.  There's almost nothing worse to me than Daddy home on the weekend with a project keeping him from playing with his kids.  So the next thought was to hire someone to pull them out.  As I thought more and more about that money going to someone rather than new rugs for our house, I decided I was going to pull these suckers out myself.

Soooo, for the past two weeks, I have gone out every other day or so and gotten to know our shovel on a very personal and meaningful level.  These ridiculous shrubs have roots in all shapes and sizes, the largest being 3-4 inches in diameter.  I have a feeling the original homeowners planted them, so they're probably close to 10 years old.  Some of them only took about 20 minutes to pull.  A couple took upwards of an hour each.  That's an hour of sweaty, frustrating, near-cursing labor intertwined with keeping the kids out of harm's way in the backyard and Hayden happy in her papasan chair.  

Daddy was in Green Bay training his new team up there for three days last week.  When he got back, I only had three shrubs left, so on Saturday he came out back and played with the kids while I finished up.  Pa-Pa and MeMaw stopped by to play with the kids for a while, so Daddy and Pa-Pa sat on the porch as I gave a play-by-play of my shrubbery massacre.  I was on my next-to-last victim when I so cleverly decided to lean all my weight against it, thinking I could just break loose the last root.  The only problem was I leaned in butt-first, and that was a huge mistake.  Literally.

It was like the parting of the Red Sea as I toppled backwards, through the shrub, onto my back on the ground.  As I was falling, I started laughing, but it was one of those silent laughs that takes over your entire body and renders you completely immobile and without cognitive function.  I think I was down for a good 2 or 3 seconds before Pa-Pa saw me.  He yelled my name and came running over to lift me up, but I was laughing so hard, I couldn't get control of myself to give him my hands.  All I needed was a couple of seconds to gain all muscle control, but the hilarity of the situation was preventing any of that from happening.  I finally stopped laughing long enough to be helped to my feet, and Jason had a great time explaining how funny it was to look over and see nothing but the bottom of my shoes peeking over the shrub.  Hardy har! 

I had the last laugh, however, as I pulled that final shrub from the ground.  Muuaaa haaa haaaa!