Lots of Progress on the Fire Pit

This week went by so fast. I cannot believe it is already October 6th. 

The big story of this week is that Brandon and I made a lot of progress on the fire pit. I'm honestly so happy with the timing of his job loss because it's given him lots of time to devote to the fire pit. 

I was feeling a little guilty about how much work he was doing on the pit.  I kind of felt like I'd "Tom Sawyer'ed him into all the work. But he told me, "It's my fire pit too. I'm happy to do this work." So that made me feel better. 

So let's go over this week and talk about the highlights and look at all the progress on the firepit. 

Sunday September 29th was a nice day. Charlotte and Lydia have been so good with our chickens. They go out and check for eggs several times a day and have been rewarded a lot. Look at all these eggs!

Brandon got a new cake decorating set as a "Yay, I got fired" present. (Really his old one had broken when he was doing Veronica's birthday cupcakes so he'd been planning to order one anyway, but the timing worked out well.)  He tested it out by making a carrot cake (with the carrots I grew) and frosting it. The cream cheese frosting recipe he used was a little odd so it didn't set up the way he wanted, but this still turned out really nice.

We got out the two big totes full of Halloween decorations and the kids had fun putting them up. (That's the Welcome pumpkin I won at Bunco.)

The decorations were really fun. 

That night we talked about watching Inside Out 2, but instead Charlotte and Lydia wanted us to watch the Curse of Bridge Hollow. They'd watched it the night before with the other set of twins. It was a fun kid friendly spooky movie. 

The funniest part was a totally obscure reference in the middle of the movie. The dad in the movie is played by Marlon Wayans who used to be on In Living Color. I never watched that show, but Brandon did. He sometimes brings up a sketch that Marlon Wayans did as "Homie D Clown." Brandon would quote him and say, "Homie don't play that way."  It's just one of his random quotes sometimes. 

Well in the movie Marlon Wayans is fighting clowns and he yells out, "Homie don't play that way!" Brandon laughed so hard. I was laughing too because I knew it was a reference to that other thing Marlon Wayans did and I thought that was clever. 

Anyway, the rest of the movie was really fun too, but that part was the cherry on top. 

Monday was a day where we were back to the routine. Brandon did a lot of job application stuff and also got things straightened out with his unemployment application. He was literally doing paperwork stuff from the moment I left the house around 8:20 til I came home around 12:00. He HATES paperwork so he was pretty miserable by the time I got home. 

When everyone was home we had a quick dinner and then went to Spirit Halloween. This has become an annual tradition. The kids love looking at the animatronic things on display. They also like being scared of them. 

We also looked at all the costumes. The kids have already decided on all their costumes for the year. Lydia is being a scarecrow and her costume is ready. Charlotte is being a vampire and we have about half her costume. Veronica is being a Viking and we'd ordered some of her costume on Amazon and have plans to embellish it. And Derrick is being a Ghostbuster and his vision of his costume is going to give me grey hairs.

He has such a specific idea of what he wants. And I just didn't have time or money to fulfil those dreams. In desperation I turned to Facebook and asked if anyone had the costume or proton pack I could borrow. My friend Cristaineide offered to let us borrow her husband's ghostbuster costume. I was so grateful. 

That just left the proton pack. We'd convinced him to let us order one off Amazon and trick it out. But he still had his heart set on the $250 one at Spirit Halloween. He spent a lot of time loving on that one. 

He wanted me to take a picture of it from the front. 

And later I found him laying in front of it gazing with adoration. 

He's fairly convinced that we will buy it next year. So when we left he said to the box, "By proton pack. I'll get you next year."

Obsessions with proton packs aside, it was a fun visit. When we were done I realized that one day we might not do this as a family. I'm not sure how much longer Charlotte and Lydia will think it's fun to go window shop at Spirit Halloween. But I'm glad we are able to do it now. 

Back at home Brandon and I had about 30 minutes before we needed to go to our dance class. I wanted to at least get a little bit of work done on the hole. So we went out there and measured out where the center was and figured out how much more needed to be dug out from the sides to get everything squared out. 

Then we climbed out of the hole. I looked back into it and said, "This time next week, it will have a floor." It felt kind of impossible at the moment. But I had hope. 

We drove over to CSI for our dance class. This week was Fox Trot. I remember a real quick unit on the fox trot when I was a Junior in High School. It was only like a day. It wasn't one of our official dances that we learned in the class, but we somehow had an extra day and so our teacher did a quick little unit on it. She'd also thrown some fox trot stuff into one of our Waltz routines. 

So during this lesson I thought I would know the basic step. But I didn't remember it at all! I was like what is this? I kept trying to do the two step. Then she showed us the promenade and I was like, "OH I DO KNOW THIS!"

But even then it was a little tricky. Brandon had no fox trot experience. He really struggled with the steps and leading me. I think this was the first we that we struggled with learning a dance. But we had a lot of fun anyway. 

On Tuesday I didn't have to go to work until about 12:00 so Brandon and I had big plans for the hole.  Brandon worked hard with the pick ax to dig out the walls so that everything was the size we needed it to be.

I worked on moving dirt. I made an opening for where the stairs will be. I moved a pile of dirt back behind the raspberries. I made room for all the dirt that Brandon would get out of the hole. 

I went to work, but Brandon kept working. He had the whole thing cleared out by the end of the day. 

He also took care of ordering the paver base that would go down on the bottom of the hole. At first we were going to buy it from Lowes. But we needed almost 3 cubic yards and that would be very expensive as well as be a lot of bags. So Brandon found it for cheaper at Southern Idaho Landscape. They'd bring us it in a truck and dump it in our driveway. Even with the $70 delivery fee it was cheaper than getting it in bags from Lowes. 

I was at work for a while because it was the first of the month so I had to send billing statements to past due clients. Brandon took care of getting Veronica dropped off to her theatre class. I picked her up. She has auditions next week - but she's so excited that she wished she could do it that day. She sang me her whole audition song - This is Halloween - while we drove home. She's pretty good. 

She also had basketball that night. So we had a quick dinner and then I took her over there. While she was at basketball I did some yardwork in the front yard. I thinned out some of the grasses that line the path. 

I don't have a picture of that, but here's a self portrait that Lydia did for art. And that reminds me of an email I got from her art teacher last week. He emailed me to let me know that Charlotte and Lydia were some of the best artists in the school - and some of the best behaved students too. It was a great email to receive. 

On Wednesday I was home from work and I had big hopes for the day. It started with another delivery of a big pile. This week's pile was paver base.

Pretty much as soon as it was delivered I was outside with the shovel and wheel barrow. I shoveled the rock into the barrow and then trucked it back to the hole. I started dumping everything into a new pile in the hole.

Brandon was busy with some job applications inside so he wasn't helping at first. I was thinking about what the nieghbors would think as they watched me work on that rock pile. I imagined explaining to them, "Brandon made the scary phone call where he had to talk about cubic yards. I'm perfectly fine moving all the rock as long as I don't have to make scary phone calls."

But after a while he came out and helped too. (He also fixed the wheel barrow so it wasn't so unstable with all the heavy rock.)

I had to pause for a bit while I lead my scripture study group - but as soon as that was over I was back in the hole. 

Brandon took care of shoveling the rock into the barrow and bringing it back to the hole. I was in the hole spreading out the rock. 

It was hot and hard work, but by 1:00 we had the pile moved and mostly spread out in the hole. 

I was like, "Oh my gosh this will actually work."  After months of digging out the hole it was amazing to be onto the next steps. 

We took showers and then took a nap. We were planning to go to Lowes and buy a tamper and a laser level after Veronica came home. 

But that didn't really work out. Someone had pulled the fire alarm at the school about 30 minutes before school was over. Veronica hates fire drills, and we actually have it written into her IEP that she gets advance warning about fire drills. But obviously this wasn't planned. So she was really on edge and basically had a panic attack. She was still really upset when she came home from school. So she and I sat on the couch and I helped her calm down while Brandon went to Lowes.  

That evening Derrick's Young Men's activity was an Escape Room. Derrick had been cautiously interested in the activity. He and I talked about what to expect. He didn't like the idea of being locked in a room. So I emailed the Escape Room company and asked if there was a way for Derrick to leave the room if needed. 

The owner got back to me and let me know that there was always a door that was unlocked. Derrick could leave through that door at any time. 

I told Derrick that and he was really happy to hear that.  He ended up being super excited about the activity. Brandon took him there at 6:15. Brandon stayed in the car and working on his laptop. Derrick went in with the other boys and had a great time. This is an email I sent the owner. 

"I just wanted to let you know that my son had an absolute blast at the Escape Room tonight. He'll usually tell me "it was good." When I ask about youth activities.

Tonight he talked to me about the Escape Room for about 10 minutes straight. He has all the codes memorized. He loved working as a team with his friends.

I didn't get this much detail from him when they went on an overnight camping trip. The hour in your escape room was definitely exciting for him.

Now he wants to come back as a family sometime.

Thanks for creating a place to make such awesome memories."

While Derrick and Brandon were gone I did more front yard work. We have a giant bunch of pampas grass growing in one of the front beds. It's beautiful, but I never actually planted it there and it's starting to get in the way and distract from the weeping birch. I was also worried about it flopping all over the driveway when we get snow.  

So I chopped it down and then dug up the roots. I moved them to an area in the side yard where the grass can grow up in front of my window. I hope it does as well there as it did in the front yard. 

While I was chopping down all the stalks I looked up and admired how pretty they were.  So I took a picture. 

I didn't want to waste time on Thursday with boring things like grocery shopping so when it was dark outside on Wednesday night I went to the store and did our grocery shopping. The kids and Brandon helped me bring it inside when I came back home. 

Thursday is another day that I don't go into work until the afternoon. And actually somehow I was only 2 hours away from my usual number of hours that I needed. So I wasn't planning to work much that day.  There was work to be done in the hole that was way more interesting than whatever was happening with billing. 

Brandon and I started the morning by figuring out how much paver sand me needed to order. With the paver base rock we'd needed 6 inches deep. With the sand we just needed it to be an inch deep. So in this case it was cheaper to buy it in bags from Lowes. Brandon ordered 28 bags while I was dropping the twins off at the middle school. 

Then we went outside and leveled the paver base. Brandon used his new laser level to make sure we were level all around. I walked around with the tamper and made sure the base was packed down. 

We were hoping the sand would be ready after we had everything level, but we were done without any word from Lowes. 

So we both went inside and worked on things on our computers. I took care of all the Castle Therapy things I needed to do. Then I logged into Aspen Grove's stuff and did an hour of work from home. 

I messaged our receptionist to find out if there was any mail. If there was no mail I would have just done everything from home. But two checks had come in the mail. So I got ready really quick and went into work for about an hour. 

While I was gone Brandon got the email that the sand was ready. He went and picked it up. 

When we were both back home we worked to move the bags of sand from the back of the Pilot to the hole. Brandon brought four bags at a time in the wheel barrow. He handed them down to me and I laid the bags out on the bottom of the hole. 

Then I opened all the bags by cutting them with the shovel. Brandon and I went around and dumped out the sand. The piled reminded me of fire ant nests. 

Then we smoothed the sand out. I used the back of the metal rake. Brandon used the push broom. 

Then he borrowed the rake and pretended this was a giant zen garden. 

I walked around with the tamper and made sure the sand was nice and solid. 

We were honestly kind of surprised at how simple this step had been. The hardest part had been waiting for the sand to be ready. After all the work of digging out the whole and then moving the paver base it was nice to have an easy win with the sand. 

While I tamped down the sand Brandon prepared to start laying the bricks. I was really excited for this step. Mainly because we'd finally reached a step that was free. We already had the brick. When we'd moved in there had been a simple brick patio in the very back of our yard. It was set up under a clothes line. We pulled it up our first spring here. I planted the raspberries where the patio had been. I'd used half the bricks as garden paths. The other half went around the first fire pit. 

The bricks had a lot of dirt on them. I told Brandon we should get a wire brush and brush the bricks off before we put them down. He suggested we should wash them. 

So he found a bucket and a wire brush and started cleaning them off. 

I'd been planning to be the one to lay the bricks. But I asked Brandon to help lay out the start of the herringbone pattern. So he started laying out the bricks while I started washing more bricks. And within about 20 minutes we realized that Brandon should be laying ALL the bricks. He was so much more precise and careful than I would be. 

So washed and washed and washed bricks. Brandon carefully laid them out. When the kids came home from school they helped carry bricks from my clean pile to the edge of the fire pit where Brandon took them and laid them down. 

He took a break to make dinner and I kept washing bricks. He laid those. Then he had to go meet with Jarod from the Orpheum to talk about designing the set platforms for the play Little Women. I kept washing bricks until it was dark.

Here's the picture of the hole I took that evening.  

On Friday I did have to go to work to actually get things done. I spent a lot of time verifying insurance for the clients currently going through the intake process. It's important to know what their insurance will cover before they start therapy. That way we can know what their copay or deductible will be like ahead of time and they aren't surprised when the insurance comes back. 

But I was out of there as soon as I hit my three hours for the day. 

When I got home I was happy to get back to work with Brandon. He'd spent the morning applying for a few more jobs. Then he'd worked to gather all the bricks from the various places they were hanging out around the yard. There had been bricks by all the garden beds where I'd placed them when I pulled them out of the paths. There had been bricks stacked behind the house where I'd put the ones I'd pulled out of fire pit 1.0. 

He carefully stacked all those bricks on a pallet that he'd put down on a grassy part of the yard by the fire pit. 

I went to work washing all those bricks. Brandon alternated between washing bricks along with me and then placing them in the hole. It was a lot of mindless work. We had fun talking and also listened to Well of Ascension on Brandon's audible. 

Here's my set up for washing bricks. This is after I'd made it through about half the pallet. I had a bucket on one chair and I'd sit on the other. I scrubbed so much and handled so many bricks that I started to have some of the skin rubbed off my hands. 

By the late afternoon this is what the bottom of the hole was looking like. That Herringbone pattern was beautiful. 

Here's another angle of how far we made it on Friday. 

I would have liked to keep working, but I'd promised Derrick that we'd go to the Pumpkin Patch at the Blue Rock farmers market that day. I was even going to pick him up from school so he didn't have to waste time on the bus. 

So at 3:30 Veronica and I drove over to Derrick's school and picked him up. Then we drove over to Blue Rock. We'd been here a long time ago in 2020. At that time it was just a corn pit and a pumpkin patch with just a little stand for the farmers market. It's really grown a lot in the last few years. But since we live on the complete other side of town we haven't seen it lately. Derrick drives by it every day on the bus. He's always telling me how cool it looks. I started following them on Facebook and I could tell it would be fun. So we planned to go there for our pumpkins this year. 

Charlotte and Lydia were originally going to come too. But they were tentatively invited to something with the other set of twins. So we decided to do the pumpkin patch without them. (I also had my suspicions that they would be a little too old to really enjoy it. I didn't want them making fun of Derrick and Veronica for having fun.)

Derrick and Veronica had a blast. There were lots of fun things to do. 

Their favorite thing was this go cart type race track. 

The "cars" were like bikes they had to pedal. 

They had a lot of fun. 

They also had fun on the big slide. 

They both went down it a lot. 

After playing for a while we went out to the pumpkin patch. 

Veronica wanted to take a picture up here. She said, "Do you want to be the Kind and Queen of the Pumpkin Patch?"

They tried to take serious looking pictures. 

We picked out our pumpkins and took them to the car. I thought we were done, but Derrick and Veronca weren't done. They wanted to slide some more and then play in the corn pit. 

Veronica wanted to be buried in corn. 

I kept thinking about how my sister Hillary had called this the "Covid pit" when we came here in the fall of 2020.

We were about to leave when the kids spotted a bowling area. So they had to play with that. 

Here's proof I was there. 

We left after being there for almost an hour and a half. Derrick is already hoping to go back with Charlotte and Lydia so they can pick out there pumpkins. 

Brandon had homemade pizza ready for us. He wanted to eat the pizza while watching something. He really wanted the kids to at least try Stranger Things. So we convinced them all to watch the first episode. And then of course they were into it so that led to the second and third episode. We probably could have kept going, but I wanted the kids to enjoy wondering about the show. So we stopped there. We watched Inside Our 2 so that the kids would have something less scary to think about while they were trying to fall asleep. 

Inside Out 2 was really good. I laughed a lot and I also enjoyed all the mental health talk. At the end when Riely feels Joy while playing hockey was really touching. Later I told the kids, "That's how I feel when I'm in my garden."

Somehow all the kids ended up on their computers after Inside Our 2. This is what it's like to have a bunch of teens and pre-teens. 

On Saturday we cleaned up the house and then went to the middle school for Veronica's first basketball game with the rec league. 

All of us were there to support her, but Charlotte and Lydia didn't want their pictures taken. So I took one with Derrick. 

Veronica was super nervous for the game. And I could tell that she was a little unsure of herself while she was playing. I realized that I probably should have watched a game with her ahead of time so she could see how a basketball game flowed. But she wasn't the only one who needed help knowing where to go and what to do. 

She's like a head taller than all the other girls. In some ways that was bad because the other team was full of scrappy little girls who stole balls every change they got. But in other ways it was good. I noticed that the other team didn't score as much when Veronica was on the floor. I think just her height was intimidating when she was on defense. 

The other team won and I knew that would be a little hard for Veronica. I also knew she'd be dwelling on all of her mistakes. So when the game was over I had Brandon take the other kids home. I took Veronica to Mcdonalds for an ice cream cone.

That was just what she needed. We talked about the game and I talked about how great it was that she was doing something for the first time. I told her that first times are always hard, but that she would figure things out and get better. She was feeling really good by the time we were done. 

We had more work to do on the hole when we got back home. I'd ordered blocks for the first layer of the wall. (Brandon and I kept having misunderstandings because he kept saying the wall would be made of brick, but I only thought of bricks as the things were were putting on the floor. So we finally settled on calling the wall materials blocks. And if you think that fight is lame you should hear us argue about the proper way to make instant oatmeal- it's a whole thing.)

Brandon and Derrick picked up the blocks from Lowes and all the kids helped move the blocks out to the backyard. 

In the middle of all this, Derrick's costume was dropped off. He was so excited and I took a picture right away to send to Cris. 

Then it was back to work on the fire pit. I helped Brandon get started on the wall. Meaning I talked to him about strategies and then he did the actual work. Then I washed bricks and washed bricks and washed bricks while he worked on that first wall. We listened to the Saturday afternoon session of conference while we worked. 

While I worked I admired all my pretty trees in the backyard. Gosh I'm lucky to have all this. 

When I was done washing all the bricks I had the kids come help move them over to the side of the hole. Charlotte helped stack them all nicely. 

And here's how far Brandon made it on the wall. He was making sure everything was perfectly level so it was quite a lot of work for him. This layer is so important. If it's in level everything else will go on really easily and look good. So he was willing to spend the time. 

It was about 4:30 when he got to this point. I was done with bricks and Brandon was kind of at the end of what he wanted to do. 

So we cleaned up all our tools and things and basically closed shop until next week. It would have been nice to have all the blocks and bricks in by the end of Saturday. But I'm immensely happy with the progress we've made this week. 

Remember, this is where we were on Tuesday morning. 

Derrick was hosting his movie night that evening so we had to transition into party mode.  So Brandon took a shower while I watered the garden. And then I took a shower. Then I took Derrick to Little Caesars to pick up the pizza we'd ordered for his party. 

When we got home there were already two boys at our house. And two more showed up soon. They all went downstairs and watched The Meg. They had pizza, soda, cookies, ice cream, and popcorn. 

They had a really fun time. This whole thing had been Derrick's idea. I was happy that he had a way to hang out with friends. 

And this was just Part One. He already had a second movie night planned to watch The Meg 2 in November. 

I was pretty brain dead most of the night. But I did make cinnamon rolls. About halfway thought Brandon said he wanted to make cinnamon rolls in addition to mine. (I'd realized my recipe was tiny.) So I switched mine to be raspberry rolls. Then I started to doubt everything when the filling was runny. 

But they actually turned out okay this morning. 

And that gets us caught up. 

Thanks for reading.