On Saturday morning, Mark announced, "The grass is starting to come in". Sure enough, two weeks after he dug the whole thing up and spread half a bag of grass seed on and under the soil, our lawn looked like the green version of a five-o'clock shadow.

I never saw brand-new grass blades before, because normally they're part of a lawn that's so thick, it's hard to really perceive one individual blade of grass without kneeling down and looking at it close-up. But now, when all we have are newly sprouted blades of grass on a patch of otherwise bare soil, it's easy to see that new blades of grass seem hair-thin.

Now that a few more days have passed, our lawn looks more like a green crew cut. The grass is about 1.5" tall, in the places where it has sprouted. There are still some bare or nearly-bare areas, but since this seed is supposed to sprout in 4-6 weeks, I'm hoping that those areas start to fill in with a green crew cut of their own before long. We'll see.