The simple pleasures in life

On any trip to Home Depot, you will be sure to find us here for at least 15 minutes:

It doesn't matter how long I let them drive, Davis always throws a minor fit when I have to pull him off the tractor.  I would avoid them b/c of this, but I remember how much I used to love to go to the hardware store with my Dad when I was little, just so that I could drive the tractors...is it just us, or does everyone love this?  I love the way that kids can make an adventure out of any simple trip or errand if you let them.  It can get frustrating when you're in a hurry, but I guess its one way they show us we need to slow down a little and enjoy the small things.

Cincinnati - Baby Shower and a Bittersweet Farewell!

As I mentioned in my last post, I took the boys up to Cincinnati the same week that Lance setup the play set.  Elizabeth, is having her first first baby at the end of July, so Julie and I threw her a baby shower.  I can't believe my baby sister is going to have a baby!  We had such a great time and packed quite a bit of fun into one week!  On our drive up, my mom called to check on our progress.  I told her we were about to stop in Richmond, KY for lunch, b/c it is one of my favorite stops along the drive.  It was unbelievable timing because she was on her way there for my Aunt Mary Ann's Special Olympics track meet.  I let the boys eat lunch and then we headed over to cheer Mary on!  Go Mary Ann!  Walk like the wind girlfriend!  She got a bronze metal in her race and we were so proud of her!

It was also a nice break in the trip to let the kids run around and stretch the legs.
We got to Cincinnati a few days before Julie and her boys, so we mostly just hung around the house and enjoyed playing in the yard, hanging with the family and eating at our favorite local restaurants (ie. Skyline)...
We took the boys to Beech Acres park one morning and they loved it as always.  I am still finding sand in their shoes from the big sand box that they have!

Harrison has been telling me for a few months now that he has been wanting to ride a roller coaster so once Julie and the boys made it into town, we all took a day to visit Kings Island.  Granddaddy came with us in the morning, took a golfing break in the afternoon and then came back to ride a few more rides and to watch the fireworks.  My mom also came up after a few morning meetings.  My sweet sweet Aunt Nancy, Aunt Carol, Uncle Kim and cousin Emily all helped out watching Davis for the day.  I feel so blessed to have such an amazing extended family and Davis didn't miss a beat - getting to go to Totter Otterville and I know he had fun getting spoiled all day!  It was so nice that they helped because we wanted to let the kids stay the whole day at Kings Island and I knew Davis just wouldn't have been able to handle it.  The park stays open until 10 pm and they do a fire works show every night so the boys wanted to see it.
I have to say, I forgot how quickly time goes by when you go to Kings Island.  It felt like the day just flew by.  We got there at about 11 am and had to get a picture up front!

Granddaddy with his special boys

First up was making sure they looked the part, so we stopped by the face painting booth

He was so proud of it and showed it to people all day long.
First up, was the airplane ride

The whole kids area is now Peanuts character themed, so we got a photo op with Charlie Brown. (I really couldn't believe that Harrison wanted to stand next to him - he is usually terrified of characters!)

They loved the cars too!

Next up was the Beastie.  It is now called the Woodstock Express but it will always and forever be 'The Beastie' to me.  Jack was very nervous and not so into the rides with the big hills, but he was a trooper.  Harrison was excited, but I think he was nervous not knowing exactly what it meant and felt like to ride a roller coaster. 

 I had to take a quick video to capture feelings about his first roller coaster ride.  I can tell from his calm demeanor that he was nervous...and clearly still excited about his face paint.

 Still smiling before the ride...

 The picture during the ride was priceless though!  Thank you Julie for realizing that we couldn't pass this one up!  Even days later, we would randomly start laughing, just thinking of their expressions!

There was another roller coaster in the kids area, called The Great Pumpkin Coaster, that is for the smaller kids and the boys really loved that one.  They probably rode it more than 10 times!

I was able to get a quick video of them on this ride...

Harrison was able to ride a few adult rides which was fun too.  For the Cincinnati folks - we were able to get Trey to ride The Vortex and he loved it!  He was so nervous all day, but he finally got up the nerve to ride it and was just on top of the world after that!
 It was such a fun day and was ended with one of my all-time favorite treats...Smurf ice cream!  It still tastes every bit as good as it did when I was little!  I think the look on this face shows exactly how much fun he had!

The boys did so great despite such a long day!  Definitely a fun memory I will treasure!
The next evening we made a trip to Graeter's in Hyde Park.  Harrison was clearly still catching up on sleep b/c he fell asleep in the car on the way there.  I put him in the stroller, thinking he would wake up once we got into the ice cream shop...nope...he stayed asleep while we ate our ice cream on the square, transferred him back to the car and woke up just as I was laying him in his bed!

I love this sweet face...

Hangin with Grandmommy...

While hanging out at the house on our last day, Davis found a new buddy...he was loving his big cousin Trey!  He started doing "trot trot to Boston" with Davis and he loved it so much that Davis wouldn't let him stop.  I love those sweet moments!

 

The rest of the time was spent getting ready for Liz's shower.  We held it at Sugar Cupcakery in Milford, OH.  Thankfully Julie is the party planner extraordinaire, and the shower was just beautiful!  We are so excited to meet this sweet baby girl and we are so excited to get to see our baby sister as a mom for the first time!  We were running around so much the day of the shower that I didn't even think to pull out my phone to take a picture!!!  Elizabeth was beautiful and she got so many cute things!  I just can't wait to play dress up with this little girl!

We had such a great week, which was made a little bittersweet by the fact that my parents sold their house and moved out on June 12th, just after we left.  They moved in when I was 4, so I have many wonderful friends and memories from that street that I will always treasure despite the house not being ours anymore!  It is still very surreal and while I was sad to say goodbye, we are thrilled to have my parents down south!

The Story of the Playset

I have been excited to write this blog post for a while now!  This is one that I didn't think would happen for a few years, but much to my surprise, was a very involved project that was finished in just 2 short months!  It all began almost two years ago.  I was sitting on the couch with a brand new baby and a sleeping two year old when Lance called me from work telling me that I HAD to run to Home Depot immediately.  He got word from a little bird that they were in the final days of clearancing out their $1800 play sets and were selling them for $50.  We were lucky that the store closest to our house had one left, so I hopped off the couch, woke up the boys and ran to the store.  Looking back, I should have called every store in a 50 mile radius and made a pretty profit!  We put the set in our garage, because we didn't think we could set it up in our backyard.  We figured it would be worth keeping until we sold our house and found a new house with a basement and a flat backyard.  Our yard here has a steep hill and flattens out at the bottom, but is not flat enough for the swing set.
Fast forward two years to one night when I had Lance meet me after work at a friends, Kiera and Brad's house to pick up the boys so that I could go out on a girls night.  We showed up, the girls left, and he ended up staying at our friend's house for a little while, letting the kids play.  When I got home that night, he was writing up plans to figure out what he needed to do to set up the playset.  He said he just couldn't believe how well all kids played outside without needing him to entertain them the whole time.  I laughed it off, but much to my surprise, this was all the motivation he needed to get to work. 

This project had three major parts that we needed to tackle:
1. Build a retaining wall to level out a 30 foot section at the bottom of our backyard
2. Haul in dirt to fill in the wall
3. Build the playset

I should start by showing a picture of our backyard before any work was done:

Part 1 - the retaining wall:
Lance wrote up the plans and figured out that we were going to need to haul in around 200 bricks.  Keep in mind that each brick weighs roughly 25 lbs.  For the next 2 weeks, we took turns running to Home Depot any chance we had, to pick up carloads of bricks.  This would not have been too bad, if we didn't have to take them to the bottom of a steep hill!  Thankfully, we made the smart decision early on to buy a suped-up, two-wheeled wheelbarrow!   We made one trip down the hill with Harrison's red wagon and almost destroyed it!  After much hard work (mostly on Lance's behalf, the wall was complete)

This in itself was a huge accomplishment, but we knew there was still a lot of work ahead of us...which brings us to...
Part 2:  The Dirt
Dumbfounded.  That is the only word I can think of to describe our feeling as we began to fully realize just how big of a project we had gotten in to.  Lance estimated that we were going to need about 14 yards of dirt, but when I was calling around to get estimates, everyone said that I might as well get a full dump truck of dirt if I needed that much.  I thought, sure, whats a few extra yards of dirt going to hurt.  The answer to that is my back!!!  We finally found a weekend to tackle this, which just so happened to be Memorial Day weekend.  Up until this point, we had been having rather cool weather, in the upper 60's, low 70's.  Unfortunately, the dirt was delivered on the hottest weekend of the year...upper 90's!  Yikes!  Lance conned his BFF, Jeremy, into coming over to help - I'm not sure he realized what he was getting into either!
The truck pulled up that morning at 9:00 am and as it backed into the driveway, I think we all got a little nervous...

 Especially these two!

They started to dump, and we started thinking, "okay, we can do this!"

"uh oh...are they at least halfway through dumping yet??"

Lord have Mercy on our souls!!!!!
We let the kids play in the mountain for a few minutes

And then we all got to work - at least they were still smiling!

The first day was a pain-staking day filled with sweat, water, beer and backaches!  It was just so hot, and the heat made everything so much harder.  Jeremy stayed until the middle of the afternoon - he is such a great friend and we definitely owe him big time!!  Lance's mom and I started helping with the shoveling in the evening and we really got into a groove and figured out how to make the project move along a little quicker.  The girls ended up shoveling and Lance was our runner/dumper.  We tried to help him occasionally with taking loads down the hill to give his legs a break.  We all took a break on Sunday morning.  Lance went golfing and I hung out with the boys.  Once the sun started to go down, we all headed back out to work some more.  The boys just had so much fun pretending they were climbing a mountain...

I put them in as dark of clothes as I could find because I quickly realized how fast that red Georgia clay stains!!  By the end of Sunday, we really felt like we had made some progress!

We were so fortunate that we chose a 3 day weekend to tackle this, because we definitely needed the third day!  We wanted to make sure we had some time as a family since the boys didn't get to do much all weekend, so on Monday morning, we took them down to Stone Mountain. 

We let Davis nap and then headed back out in the late afternoon.  We knocked out the rest, with me shoveling and Lance running and we finally made it to the end of the pile!

Praise the Lord!!

All of that hard work created this:

We debated as to whether we wanted to lay down wood chips or try to fill it in with grass.  I think the thought of having to carry anything else down the hill freaked us all out, so Lance picked up a few bales of hay to lay down and we are going to attempt to plant grass this fall. After all of this, I headed to Cincinnati with the boys to throw a baby shower for my little sister and to say farewell to my childhood home (parents are moving down south - woohoo!), so Lance decided he would take the week to get the play set built so that the boys would be surprised when we got back.
He did most of the work by himself and would send me status updates throughout the week...
The main structure was set

Add on the swing portion and the rock wall...

And ta-da, with one day to spare before we made it back from our trip, the playset was complete!

All of that hard work, for this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-to3Uy1-hQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Davis is even big enough to do the teeter totter with Harrison!  You will also notice that after a day of getting knocked by the swings, Oakley figured out the best place to hang!

It was very appropriate that Father's Day would fall on this weekend because of how hard Lance worked to put this play set together, all for his love of our boys.  Their smiles and excitement made it worth every painstaking minute!

We love you Lance and are so lucky to have such a devoted husband/daddy!!