Exciting (for us) updates

Biking! After many long, persistent attempts at biking, Hadden has succeeded! Yippee! For a few days, he could bike on his own, but he was having trouble getting started. He has now mastered it and is cruising right along with Savannah. Many nights, we have to drag him in after the sun is down :)


House progress! We have been in Alabama almost 9 months and after that long anticipated wait ... we would like to announce our new baby ... house! Hee. We finally have the footer poured and it feels good to have that behind us.

At what will be the front of the house, we have some BIG rocks which just were mean and would not budge. So in order to make the footer level, get below frost zone on the exposed part of the basement AND account for the rock, what will be the back of the house had to go fairly deep. To help offset some of that depth, we put some large rocks in the center of the footer before pouring.


Here we go! Please note that I am working ... in many of the pictures, I am doing a lot of observing :) We both worked our tails off that day, but it was worth it. John ended up doing a lot of the heavy duty pushing and leveling. I just tried to help out as much as I could.


Even though we just got started, the driver quickly saw that he needed to thin out the concrete in order for us to move it halfway across the house. Our site is a little tricky for getting the truck around where it would be most accessible, so we had to do a lot of pushing the concrete. I think we're already saying "havin' fun yet?"


Savannah even got in on the action! She was watching me smooth the top of the concrete and she thought it looked like fun (it is!). We had a little leftover concrete, so we put together a form for supporting a future deck. Looked like a perfect project for Savannah and she did a great job! This is how it looked before - I forgot to take an after, but I did shoot a little video of her in progress.


Here's the "after" of the footer - whew!


Savannah sporting her new look - bike helmet and grimy from the dust!


Here's Hadden's version! The picture doesn't show the full extent of the grimo's!


Lastly, we couldn't go without putting a handprint in concrete! We made little stepping stones for the garden with their handprints. All in all, it was a fun day. We were thankful that it didn't rain even though it was pretty hot.


Signing off for now - the kiddo's are patiently waiting for a bedtime story.