July, Part 2: HOA!

We had a very small triangle on the front strip of grass by the sidewalk that had been covered with small rocks by the previous owner (possibly for drainage purposes?). Jeremiah hated those rocks because the neighborhood kids would pick them up and throw them into the street and because if I backed out over them, it would get rocks on our driveway. One day, in a fit of frustration, Jeremiah removed all the rocks completely and just left a triangle of dirt. I told him we should probably just leave the rocks there until we had something to replace them with, but he couldn't wait. On top of that, our front lawn had been ravaged by voles last winter (blasted voles). In addition to that, it was covered with weeds and crab grass. In fact, I would venture to say that it had become more crab grass than regular grass. It looked fine when it was mowed, but if it wasn't mowed, it looked pretty bad.

Well, as a result, we got dinged by the HOA. In our defense, there were a LOT of houses in the neighborhood that had grass and front yards that were way worse than ours. However, they gave us two weeks to fix the problem or to face further discipline (whatever that would be--probably a fine of some sort). So, Jeremiah and his brother, Bri, ended up tearing out the sod in our front yard and replacing it with new sod. We really don't have much lawn in our front yard, but holy cow this turned out to be a lot of work.

Above: With no place to put the old sod, we piled it on our sidewalk and the edge of the road.

Above: Meanwhile, Peter had earned this Lego pirate ship for working so hard at Sylvan. Jeremiah was originally slated to put it together with Peter, but since the front yard took so much longer to do than anticipated and since Peter just happened to earn this Lego pirate ship at the very same time, I ended up putting the Lego pirate ship together. It took about three hours. It was a ton of work. I was quite proud of my efforts. I took this picture because I knew that Peter wouldn't keep this pirate ship together for long. I made him promise to me that he would keep it together for at least a week. I think it lasted about 24 hours. :( So much work... Peter took it apart, despite my asking him not to, because he wanted to build something else with the pieces. I could just buy random Lego pieces if he wanted to build anything with them! This ship wasn't cheap. I should have glued the dang thing together! It will never be the same again. As a result of disobedience, I put all of the pieces together in a little tupperware tote and he was grounded from playing with it for a week. It was such a fun day!

Jeremiah ended up clearing our sidewalk and putting the sod that was on the sidewalk onto the road. It stayed there. I gave him a deadline. I told him it had to be gone before he went to scout camp (the week of the 24th of July). Jeremiah said, "Why? I don't care about it being there." I said, "I care about it being there! Plus, I don't want to be dinged by the HOA again."

With the bishop's approval, it ended up as a scout project (Jeremiah is the ward scout leader). The scouts came over and a scout leader with a truck took away loads of our sod and dumped it into the church dumpster. Mostly, the scouts sat and ate the brownies and cookies I had made for them and the scout leaders did all the work. However, long story short, the sod was cleared away by the end of the night...about five days before scout camp started. We will be looking for an HOA-free neighborhood for our next house.