Magic

When I was a little girl, I had a list of places in my life that were magical.

1. My grandma's backyard, when she lived in her "old" house. I don't even know what town it was in, but somewhere in Utah. It had a little play house tucked into a little shady nook. It had a trampoline. It had little stone paths were under the shade of giant arching branches, that led to different areas of the yard including a little fire pit where we could roast marshmellows. This magnificent back yard was probably about 700 square feet if i were to look at it now, but when i was a kid, it was enchanting and magical.

2. My back yard growing up. There was a giant tree that we would climb in and i had my favorite branch that i would sit on for "hours" :) There were terraces which seemed like great walls of china that I could walk along, and at the bottom of the three terraces a wide path that curved around under a row of trees, and when you walked along the grass and looked up, it seemed like you were in some enchanted (or haunted depending on the day) forrest. And at the end of the path our neighbor had a giant tree that grew these freakishly large balls that we appropriately called "monkey brains" becuase really....there was no other way to describe these things. I still, to this day, have no idea what they are. But we would play with them for "hours" and heaven help the poor soul who was tagged with one during dodge ball. It was magical.

3. Our fireplace growing up. I lived in the suburbs and so we didn't do campfires very often (except the occasional garage fire me and my brother ignited...but...thats another story) SO when we had fires in our fireplace, i remember sitting by the hearth watching it, mezmorized. And then we would get our roasting sticks and roast marshmellows in it. It was magical.

4. The Big Pit: We had these woods at the edge of our neighborhood that me, my brother, and our neighborhood gang would spend pretty much our entire summer in. There was a little park by the woods, and we found a neat little path that led to a dried up creek bed, i guess is what it was. But it had huge walls of dirt on either side, so to us it was like the grand canyon. We named it the big pit and had all kinds of games we played there. There was a giant cement culvert that we could go through and play hide and seek in (don't worry mom,...there was rarely ever water in it :)) and in the winter sometimes it would freeze up and we could ice skate on it. These woods were also the home to "midnight" our resident warewolf that i was terrified of until i was at least in junior high.....magical....

There are more to the list, but those are the bigs ones I've thought about lately as my kids are growing, and my desire to create magic for my kids in their childhood is surfacing.....

I think the place we've chosen to live has a lot of "magic" potential for our kids. I guess, that's assuming our kids get the same kick out of the great outdoors that me and scott do. When Scott and I barely started dating, I knew he was a keeper when one night we were talking about things we'd like to have in our "yard" someday, and he said he wanted to build his kids a "tree fortress" like the swiss family robinsons. I'd never even seen that movie at the time, but I had always had envisioned my future kids having a tree fortress with swinging bridges through the trees.....destiny......anyways, I digress :)......we've started to come up with some ideas for our yard that i'm excited about....

Scott made us a log porch swing.....i LOVE IT

this is showing the sweet rocks we're uncovering in our back yard. We're still deciding what to do with the hillside, it may be a launch site for a future zip line :)

Scott found a place to get free slate drops. So we decided to make a slate fire pit. We've got about 1/3 of it done, and i think it's awesome. Here's what we've done so far.....

It's going to be inbetween two lines of rocks, so it's kind of hidden looking at it from the driveway. I think it's so fun becuase the rocks are big and fun to climb on, so while we're having our s'more's festivities or whatever, the kids, and me, can be jumping and climbing on the rocks. FUN

This is the view standing on one of the big rocks. We might need to make the fire circle a little bigger...not sure yet. But all that area will be slated.

One row of rocks. It's amazing to see them like this. I should have taken more "before" pictures of what all this looked like when we were building our house. I didn't even know some of these rocks were here becuase the brush was so thick.

more rock views....

anyways...just one of many little "projects" we have planned. We have to make our house the coolest place on the planet, so our kids won't feel jipped about living out in the boonies with no friends around :) who needs friends when they'll have such fun things to do at home, right?? :) we'll see.....