(Moment of silence)
What? You all aren't as excited/proud about this as I am?
That's because you don't understand how it was a herculean task.
First off, there were a lot of leaves. I think a month or so after Lucy was born, I got a burst of energy and swept. That was before the sycamore in our front yard started undressing for her long winters' nap.
There were so many leaves that when our friend Chris Hobson came over the other day, we knew he had arrived well before he knocked.
"Swiiiiiish (gate opening over thick carpet of leaves)
Crunch crunch crunch crunch.
Knock knock."
I was ROTFLMAO by the time he came in.
That was when I decided I had to sweep.
So yesterday I worked up the courage and put Lucy down for her nap and headed outside with broom and dustpan.
HA HA HA!
I kill myself sometimes!
I didn't have any luck putting Lucy down for a nap, so I put her in the sling. Then she wanted to nurse, so I latched her on.
Then I got the broom. Luckily the dustpan was on a shelf, because when she's nursing in the sling it's a tad hard to just bend over and grab things off the ground.
Hmmm. The leaves (and a rich loam/ecosystem formed by their decay) were on the ground.
Does anyone see a problem with this?
Now you understand why this task was herculean.
So what I did, see, was I swept the leaves into (very large) piles. One handed, with a push broom. That was the easy part.
Then I got the cover of the trash can, which is sort of bowl-shaped, and put it on the ground.
I stepped on the cover so that one half of the bowl tipped onto the ground.
Then I swept the leaves over my foot onto the cover. Carefully.
Then I carefully squatted (Lucy's still nursing) and picked up the cover one-handed. I dumped it into the yard waste recycling can.
Surprisingly, my method was somewhat effective. Luckily, leaves are light, and sort of big, so they actually slept decently, as long as I truly swept them over my foot.
In hindsight, it was a good thing I was wearing longish socks and sneakers, because in mid-sweep, a black spider with a very large abdomen crawled out of one of the piles of leaves and onto our planter.
Black spider + large abdomen = black widow?
I leaned forward to try to see if it had an hourglass but remember, I can't lean forward very well.
Then I thought, which is more important? Getting all of these leaves swept up? Or avoiding poisonous spider bites?
The choice was simple.
I squished the spider with my sneaker and kept sweeping.
See, I was almost done!
Once I got the leaves swept up (the yard waste can is FULL), there was still the rich loam (and probably more spiders nourished by it).
This was easier: I swept it out of our patio into the dirt by our front walkway.
It made quite a pile.
By this time, Lucy had fallen asleep.
Some of you might be wondering why I didn't just make Dyami do the sweeping.
1. Because I never remember to ask him while he's home.
2. Because I make Dyami do a lot of unpleasant things for me and I feel bad sometimes.
3. Because I have something to prove.
Dyami is a lovely, lovely man who does a ton of stuff around the house. But he doesn't do yard work usually without prompting. Unfortunately, I grew up in a family of gardeners, and Dyami--well, not so much.
That's not actually accurate. My mom-in-law, Donna, is a very good gardener. But their back yard has a walnut tree in it. Walnut trees kill any plants their shadow falls on (this isn't really an exaggeration). Walnut trees, however are impossible to kill (I think one method involves chopping the tree down, dousing the stump in gasoline and lighting it on fire. No joke).
You could imagine a good gardener gets slightly morose when their hard work ends in a walnut tree swooping over and saying, "Brou ha ha ha ha."
Growing up with an
That's why I had to be Hercules.
Let's see:
Hercules made his name sweeping poop out of some stables.
I poop our baby and sweep out the front patio while nursing.
Ha! Who's the hero now?
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