yard work

So, this is not really a useful medium for this question, but I haven't come up with a good
answer and I'm feeling like I ought to do something and many of the people on my friendslist
are local.

We have a small Somerville backyard. It keeps getting overgrown with weedy grass that likes
to grow really tall, and even in the best of time management scenarios we can manage a cycle
of "whine about it for a month, kill part of an afternoon with a weed whacker, feel grumbly,
repeat." Our time management situation is about to get a lot worse.

In the long term we want to do something cool like plant a ground cover that will take over the yard,
not need mowing, and look nice. Or maybe pave half the yard and ground cover the other half, or something.

In the short term, we just want some way to ignore the problem. I thought we'd pay some
gardener/landscaper type to just deal with it, maybe putting down sod that might stand a chance
against the weeds, but I only found one (via arbitrary google search) and I'm not spending $3K on
a temporary solution that might not work, not even including paying them to come back and mow it or anything.

But given the baby arriving sometime soon, even something less complex would be nice to hire someone
else to Deal With. Anyone got suggestions for someone we could pay to weed whack the yard, and then lay down black tarps or landscaping fabric or something over the yard to just kill it till next spring? Or
even someone who could weed whack or mow it every few weeks till it stops growing this fall?