this afternoon Jeff, the boys, and I cleaned up the back yard…

although it had been raked a while ago, there were tons of leaves… we don’t actually have any trees that drop leaves in the yard, but the neighbourhood elms do love to share their bounty with us at the end of the season…

jumping in the “bed”…

the little boys mainly helped by jumping into the pile of leaves… I was amazed at how patient their daddy was as they leaped and tossed and cavorted among the raked leaves… then, of course, they had to be raked up again…

daddy trying to uncover faces…

while they worked on that, I dumped out pots, dug up dahlias and bundled pots into the shed… planters went under the deck and the umbrella was put away to wait for the spring…

one left… had to move fast to get pictures…

Jeff spent a fair bit of time working on the pond… getting leaves out of it with the net and then vacuuming around the edges to clean it up… he tried to find a way to remove the pump completely, but the cord is stuck under some rocks and we didn’t want to disturb them…

trying to get the pump cord loose…

the yard looks great, all ready for the cold weather and snow that will be coming… today it was 10 Celsius as we were working, which was pretty warm… usually we have snow on Halloween so we are doing very well…

somewhere I have a great picture of George and Kyler raking leaves in the front yard… couldn’t find it tonight, though…

after all that hard work we had a lovely dinner together…