Before/After and Snake Update

Finally we have a yard! After several months of playing on our driveway and realizing that most kids in public housing have more greenspace than our child we decided we HAD to do something so she had a place to play outside. When we bought this house 3 years ago it was a plus that we had a really big wooded lot with basically only a small yard area. Our needs have dramatically changed since then so we had to improve the yard to fit our growing family. The side area you see above has always been an unusable overgrown mess that we have basically ingnored. It was the only way to expand our yard and so we had a retaining wall built and sod put down and there you have it . . . we have a yard! We still have a lot of finishing work to do ourselves as far as mulching and doing some planting (you can see a picture of the yard boy planting my hydrangeas) but the basic canvas is there. We can't wait to play out there and get a little picnic table so we can eat lunch outside too! We were a little nervous about laying sod during the worst drough in almost 20 years but about 10 minutes after they laid the sod it starting raining and it poured all day on Saturday and we got a good soaking again today! Free water is a big deal when you start talking about watering as much as we need to the next few weeks so we were really excited.
Ok, everyone wants to know about the snake so I should update you on that saga. It ends happily for us and not so happily for the giant snake. It was about a month ago, we were getting Claire ready for bed when I heard someone knocking at the door. I went to see who it was and found my neighbor standing there barefoot, in his swimming trunks, goggles on his head, holding a dustpan and broom - I opened the door and he said "I found your snake!". I figured by the way he was dressed that the snake was in his pool but it turns out that his girlfriend pulled up to the house and found the snake laying across his front steps. The snake slid into a drainage pipe where he was hiding. We all went out there and the men attempted to get the snake out of the pipe and into a garbage bag by running a hose into the pipe. Our neighbor really didn't want to kill the snake - he wanted to take it to the creek or something. Since it was on his property I couldn't really argue although I told Rhett to go get the ax and have it handy. The garbage bag idea obviously didn't work (I could have told them that) so they tried to get the snake into a big garbage can. They managed to do that but as soon as the snake got into the can it literally stood up (all 6.5 feet) and started coming out of the can. By this time it was getting angry and trying to slither away so FINALLY they chopped the snake's head off and it was dead. So that is how the snake story ends. Hopefully, I won't have anymore snake stories in the future to share.