Pickup Sticks

This weekend we played an enormous game of pickup sticks. Actually we play this game every week during the summer with our backyard trees. The wind blows and dead sticks from these overgrown monsters litter the ground. We give them a good pruning once or twice a summer, but they grow like wildfire. This weekend's game was a bit bigger than mere pickup sticks--more like prune/clean out/saw down huge limbs, then clean up afterward. It took hours and we were sunburned, scratched up, and exhausted (just in time to chaperone the stake dance that night), but it was long overdue.

The kids LOVE climbing these trees because there are so many low branches. Since they were planted too low in the ground (not by us, as though we'd know better,) we've had to wait til they grew big enough to support cutting off major branches at the base.

during...getting overwhelmed at this point...

Our awesome neighbor helping us out with his chainsaw. We totally owe him.

The larger than life pile of pickup sticks--this overwhelms us the most


And the deceivingly large pile of firewood chopped up from the limbs that filled two loads in the back of our suburban

All cleaned up! We were amazed with how much the backyard grew and we're hoping this saves us hours of 'pickup sticks' this summer. We can see the sky again, hooray!

Well, we took care of the firewood pile for FHE activity Monday night, hauling it over to the scout closet at the church. The beaver den/snake pit in the corner is next on the list and we're getting the guts up to tackle it next weekend. A few years of pruning and relentless pickup sticks has gotten out of control and grown well beyond anything get-ridable in any normal way. I'm certain there's an analogy there. Not so certain I want to see what's living at the bottom of the pile, but if it's no more mortifying than the pile itself, perhaps I'll post a picture once we discover... It'll be news to me because I'm pretty sure I want nothing to do with uncovering the mystery. A girl can dream.