WAKE UP!

For those of you who don't know Ryan you don't know that on weekends he is up earlier than weekdays. Why you may ask??  I STILL HAVE NO IDEA!! He has no reason to be up!  Norah and I TRY to sleep in till a reasonable hour (aka 7am) But sometimes that just doesn't happen.  Ryan will TRY to be helpful by emptying the dishwasher or doing dishes or making us breakfast... however NONE of those tasks are appreciated at 5:30am!!!!  Mostly because none of those tasks are quiet!!!  This weekend Ryan hit a new time record for waking us up... mind you Norah and I were already up having breakfast but I did have to come out and remind Ryan that our neighbours were probably still sleeping!!  This is what I found Ryan doing at who knows what time in the morning (probably before half the world was awake!!). 

He did stop and continue later on at a more reasonable hour!!  You might be asking what he was doing?  We had cut down a few trees in the backyard that were growing MUCH to close to the house!  They were just lying at the back of the yard and we decided at first we wanted to make Norah a sand box.  But after thinking about it a lot and after reading this post over at Young House Love where they discovered play sand has a big fat warning on it that it may cause cancer etc. And seeing their pea gravel pit they made for their daughter. We came to a few conclusions:

* Norah hates putting her feet in the sand anywhere... why would a sand pit in our backyard be any different
* Norah's favourite activity (next to the swing) in the backyard is to pick up all the gravel around the deck and put it in buckets and then put it back where it goes
* Sand boxes = large cat litter box... even if you have a lid
* Sand boxes = raccoon litter box
* Pea gravel boxes are awesome!!

So with all of that we decided we would make Norah a pea gravel box out of the old tree logs.  The plan is to cut the logs into 6 foot lengths. We are going to notch out the logs so they sit nicely together and it will end up being a 5 foot by 5 foot box on the inside.  We borrowed my dads chainsaw and Ryan had a blast going to work on the logs!

After they were all cut he placed them in a box.  Now we just have to notch them out and attach them together. We plan on getting gardening material for the bottom to keep the rocks in the box. There won't be big gaps in the box when we finally notch the logs out but for now this is what it looks like.