4th O July Weekend

You have to love this time of year! All the holidays present perfect opportunites to get outside and enjoy the summer sun! Our 4th of July was great. We BBQ with my family and played a couple of games of Farkle before we headed over to Kris's Dad's house for his stepmothers birthday party. There is nothing like hanging out with family, having fun, and free food! It was a good for Cooper to see family he hasn't in a while. It was also a good day for firsts. He finally started to crawl on his hands and knees instead of "Army Crawling." Cooper also experienced a sand box for the 1st time. He and I sat there and I tried to get him to touch the sand, it took some serious convincing; I buried his feet, and he tried to eat the sandbox toys. I would have to say that was a good experience. He liked it better than grass. I also had the brilliant idea to see if he would like the water slide. Yeah not so much. I wasn't smart enough to touch the water first before I sat him down on it. It was freezing cold hose water and he instantly started to cry. So to win back his affection I fed him and then we left for the night to make sure he fell asleep before the neighbors started to light fireworks.Aside from all this fun we actually had a weekend that wasn't planned with "fun" activites all weekend. So Kris and I decided it was a great weekend to get started on Part 2 of our back yard remodel. Thursday Kris and our roommate Dave headed over to Lowes after work and picked up 2 1/2 pallets of tan retaining wall bricks. After a pretty penny and some extra tools of course we ready to get started! We both knew what we were getting into but didn't know how frustrating it could be. Of course I am a genius at leveling things and how dirt works perfectly for this! So I suggested that we the "soft" clay like dirt first and then we would use the 5 bags of sand. Lets just say after the 6 hours that it took just to lay the first row. We learned that they tell you to use sand as your base for a reason!! Our second row of bricks took a quarter of the time it took to lay the first row. From there it went really fast. We had all 5 rows done around 4p.m. and then a serious set back happend. Since we had an extra 50 bricks hanging around we decided to put another row on. I went inside to check on Cooper and shortly after Kris came inside. His face said it all! Something had happened. If you split our 60 Ft. wall into the 3rds the center 1/3 of the wall had decided not to stand anymore but rather lean against the dirt wall that was about a foot behind it. OH!!! We were almost done. Seriously mabye 10 more bricks and we were going to call it a night. But no!!! So Kris quit swearing and got back to work of pulling the collapsed wall and re-stacking a couple of rows and then filled in the gap with gravel before repeating until 6:30pm when he had finally finished. We had started at 9 a.m. so I would say we had a dang good work out!

Before "The Wall"

The Great Collapse of 2008

Success!!!