What do you do with a house full of kids?

This past Sunday night my brother, Lee and his wife Tricia, dropped off their 6 kids at our house for Spring Break. They were leaving early Monday morning for New York City to celebrate their 15th anniversary and we agreed to have their kids come and hang out with us while they were out of school. I have to say that I wondered how everything would go having 9 kids all to myself for 4 days, but we have had a great time!

For the most part the kids are very helpful and mind me when I ask them to do things. And luckily for me the weather on Monday and Tuesday was WONDERFUL!! So, what do you do with a house full of kids when the weather is great outside?? You put them to work on your yard! Why try to do all the work myself when I have very able bodied youth at my beck and call? I had them help me do some things that Bump has been refusing to tackle!

I don't know when the pine needles were last touched under these pine trees in my side yard. We started raking and raking and the pile just kept getting bigger and bigger. We also trimmed up the bottom of the juniper bushes and cut off the lower branches of the pine trees that were tangled down in the juniper bushes. We completely filled Tracy and Steve's horse trailer with pine needles and I finally gave up on digging all the needles out that are still living in the juniper bushes! These pictures were taken on the first afternoon. I forgot to take any the next day when we dug the rest of the garbage and needles out from under the bushes, loaded up the horse trailer, took it to the dump and trimmed and cleaned out all of our other vines and bushes around the yard! We are all very sore still today!Overall the kids have been great and we have had a lot of fun playing video games and getting treats at the local fast food place where their cousin works (discount!!) and hopefully everyone has had fun! I know I have!