Garden & Yard Cleaup, Bedroom Painting, & Pumpkin Carving

On Friday morning, I headed over to the doctor's office to find out what has been causing the intestinal pain I've been having for the past couple weeks.  About two months ago, I caught an intestinal virus, started to get better before I then caught a more severe one two weeks later.  I started to improve two weeks after that to then have this pain start up.  I was having bouts of nausea, fatigue, and limited to almost no appetite.  According to the doctor, intestinal viruses can bring on IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and based on what I had described, this is what she felt I was experiencing.  She prescribed a drug used to treat IBS that helps with the abdominal discomfort.  I've taken them for the past couple days and am noticing some improvement, so let's hope it continues!  Once we got home, Hailey & I spent almost the whole day cleaning up the garden and raking leaves so Brian could mow the grass when he got home from work.  We filled 6 lawn/leaf bags full of garden plants and leaves.  My hamstrings are killing me from all the squatting and bending over!!  I'm so out of shape!  I would have put it off until Saturday or Sunday when Brian could be home to help, but it was supposed to rain both days and we have a busy weekend next weekend.  Oh well, good exercise!

On Saturday, we got up and painted our guest bedroom a brown color called "Down Home" by Sherwin Williams.  Now, I just need to finish my decorating ideas for that room, which might take a while (because one of the ideas requires me to make a few quilts and that may be 6 years from now at the rate I'm going!).  I then worked on more of one of my scrapbooks for most of the afternoon.  I'm getting closer to getting it done, which will make me feel better, because as Brian pointed out, I'm always working on several incomplete projects at one time.


Today we put the guest bedroom back together in the morning and then carved pumpkins in the evening!  We're looking forward to Halloween next Sunday!  Hailey has settled on being Minnie Mouse.  I think she's getting into it more this year, which is so fun!

A couple Hailey funnies...this morning she was riding her bicycle around the basement and yelled up, "Daddy?"  Brian said, "What do you need, Hailey?"  She said, "Daddy, my bicycle is out of gas!".  Tonight she was putting an ice pack on an ankle blister she got several days ago (that's almost healed) and told me, "This ice pack has water in it.  I need a different one."

 I left the zucchini and squash plants in, because I still had growing fruit on them, but I'll be taking the zucchini out next weekend.  It didn't survive the frost we had the other night.  I added some of the fallen leaves to the empty beds as leaves provide good nutrients to the soil.

If you can imagine most of the yard covered in light brown leaves, that is what it looked like before Friday's cleanup.

Digging in!

  Yuck!  This is slimy!

Helping Daddy carve.

Finishing up with Mommy.

All done!

With the lights out.