Now You See It, Now You Don't

Two completely unrelated, amazing things disappeared recently.

1. The Lunch Battle
Since my surgery F's been eating school lunches on the days he's at school for a full day.  While our school lunch program is decent, with a fairly "healthy" offering pretty much every day, they also offer a total kid meal every day.  There isn't one day a week when you can't get chicken nuggets, pizza, or a hot dog. It's hard for chef's salad, pasta, or teriyaki chicken bowl to compete with pizza.  While I was down for the count I think F ate pizza for about four meals in a row. When I bounced back I suggested that he think about which thing was the best for his body and pick that.

Today, for the first time since spring break, I managed to move fast enough in the morning to pack him a lunch.  I literally squealed with glee when it came home looking like this:

not a speck left!

Guess Mom's lunches are edible after all.  Perhaps this is the beginning of a long, healthy relationship with the lunch box.

2.  We took out the spruce tree that was taking over the front of our house.  Now, we LOVE our trees. They are all about 30 years old, huge, mature, beautiful but SO SO big. As soon as we moved in I had the 6 dead and dying Aspen trees cut down.  When the wind blew they'd knock the eaves and roof.  It was freaky.  A previous owner planted the two spruce in the front and they are stunning trees,  BUT HUGE.  We trim the one closest to the house twice a year. You can't tell from this angle, but when you'd look out our front window all you'd see was tree from 2/3 of the window.  It constantly bumps against the house and windows ( we've been trying to keep it hacked back).

The crew arrived just as F and I were headed out the door for school drop off.  We made sure they were working on the right tree and I dashed off to school.  When I came back 30 minutes later (must have time to chat with the other moms!) The tree was GONE. 

The guys hopped in their bucket and shaped the remaining blue spruce, it's a nice cone shape now and the twin tips at the top are gone.  Poor F missed the whole thing.  Luckily the stump remover came later in the day and F got to watch him grind the stump to nothing.

We see a lot more of the side of our neighbor's house now, our 3 year plan includes some large shrubs and a new smaller tree for the space.  We'll also put in a walkway from our back yard to the front.

On the surgery front I'm still pretty swollen (it's really hard to elevate your hip) and I'm barely limping. I still can't put all my weight on my right leg going up/down stairs.  It's getting stronger every day, but PT says it'll take a while to get it back.  I told her she's got until the start of ski season to get me up and kicking at 110%.