Swing sets, jackhammers, and parades

Last weekend, we started a swing set and dug 2- 3 foot deep holes (which proved to be more fun than swinging for the boys).  They were unbelievably excited to help with the process.  They had their own shovels and worked with us  and of course, got into the holes...  This weekend (4th of july) we had to finish filling those holes with concrete.  The 9 bags we filled it with weren't enough so mixing another 10 was, let's just say, really fun...  Keith and I just kept saying, "This is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be".  I guess you can say, that when we do all of our necessary house projects, we expect them to be hard, but  a swingset, that should've been a blast.  Whew!  Glad to be done and the boys love it. Its fun to just sit and take a million pics of them whooshing in the little moments of their childhood...

  After a few hours of curing, we were off to a great Saturday with lots of swinging fun before Huddy's playdate at his buddy Jonah's house...

Next, we weren't feeling tired enough, so Keith's buddy brought over his new jackhammer attachment.  Okay, I think, let's tear up 6 tons of concrete this afternoon.  I mean how hard can that be. We have bobcat.   So, we do this:

And you see those giant chunks of rock.  Well, we have to pick all of those up and put them into bobcat bucket.  It just couldn't scoopem' up right.  I likened this task to that of building a pyramid without a crane or any heavy equipment.  Eli, was a cheerleader and he helped us all day. I couldn't believe it.   Huddy was at Jonah's playing lego starwars and he was loading rocks into a bucket and he loved it.  We took him for Indian food afterwards and he kept telling the waitress.  "I help."  He is sooooo like a little Keith and Hudson is soooo like a little me.   We managed to get the backyard back to homeostasis.

 So we got to feeling a little bored with ourselves. I mean who wants to lay in a hammock on the 4th of july weekend. Not us. So we decided that it was time to cover the soffet in the kitchen. I mean, we've only been looking at exposed pipes for a year in the kitchen. Why do it one more day? So out comes the chop saw, sander and router. Luckily, for the boys I am not a die hard. I weedeated the front yard and got to making cookies, setting up the sprinkler and making lego star wars out of toilet paper rolls and tissue paper...While papabear did what he does best. BUILD!

Boys were cracking me up. They didn't want to get wet in the sprinkler, so they used their unbrellas.

This is so obviously, YODA!

Clone trooper, yo!

So Monday, the big day came and we were up at 9am at he Pancake breakfast fundraiser for CAIN (Churches Active in Northside). Then we crashed in on our friends John and Fernanda by 10:30am. By 11:30, we were at our house getting ready for the parade we were going to be in. We joined these guys:

Huddy Buddy and Eli got their drills on Friday and started practicing early:

We all got into the Men's Drill team this year and it was a LONG, hot parade.  Luckily, their were Mojitos at Liz and Fred's, Hawaiin Shaved Ice at the festival and we ended the evening with an impromptu dinner party with Hudson's best buddy, Jonah's family...  And to think the boys say they are bored, today....

Happy Fourth of July!!!