The guests have all returned home and we’re all getting ready to return to our normal schedules next week. That meant a bit of cleaning today — getting things back in some semblance of order after four days of fun in sixes as opposed to fun in fours. Fifty percent more people results in decidedly more than fifty percent more mess, but who’s complaining? It gave the kids a bit of a chance to build some character.

In the morning, the Boy and I finished off a little project we’d started the day before. The area in front of our new fence’s gate will never — never — see grass again due to the simple fact that the gate funnels foot traffic in a way that an open space never did. We dug down about four inches, added some landscaping timbers and two dozen bags of river rock and solved the problem.

We created a new one in the meantime. The Boy, as always, was keen to help. He wanted to help drive the spikes into the timbers.

“Be careful,” I said. “You can easily get hurt.” A little Boy slinging a two-pound hammer about could be a formula for a mini-disaster, and that’s exactly what happened. He was driving in the spike I’d started for him, holding the hammer with two hands as I’d instructed when he unexpectedly reached down and grabbed the spike with one hand just as he was dropping the hammer. The crying was as close to screaming as it could be: he struck a glancing blow that gouged out a little hunk of flesh.

He sat in my lap afterward for a long time as the cry died to a whimper and then finally stopped. It was another one of those little reminders about how being a parent is such a gift. There was only one person on the planet whom he might have would have picked over me to comfort him: K. It’s medicine for the soul to feel that needed.

In the afternoon, the family went to a local plant nursery to pick up the shrubs and trees we’re going to use to fill in the corner of the fence.

“I don’t want the first thing people see when they pull into our driveway to be that fence,” K said on more than one occasion. That fence — K has a love/hate relationship with it. She loves the sense of security it provides given the simple fact that one of our neighbors has a pit bull that has gotten out of its small fenced area a few times, but she hates the look.

We hope to finish the planting tomorrow — the above is a before shot as a point of reference prior to our initial planting today. The forecast doesn’t look cooperative, though. We’ll find something to do, though, no doubt.