July 30th (belated)

Karen's immediate family had a reunion over the 24th of July weekend.  Everyone takes turns hosting it and this was supposed to be the year Karen and I hosted it at our house.  Since December her family was fairly sure that we wouldn't be able to take our turn due to Karen's pregnancy.  In February it became very clear we wouldn't be hosting it due to the cancer diagnosis.

As part of the reunion they have some fun and games for the kids (big, little and adult ones) and a service project.  To help us out they did the fun stuff at her brother's in Salt Lake and then the service project at our house.  Karen's parents came down the week before to help out and her dad helped me look around and see what we wanted to work on in the yard and do some prep to make things go a little faster.  We took out three dead tree stumps (we found a fourth with everyone here) and figured out where to put the lava rock we were going to take out of the flower beds.

The morning of, and before anyone had shown up yet, a couple of neighbors helped me out by grabbing a load of top soil and then one of them used his little tractor to move the dirt into the backyard and a into a few other spots.  That sped things up quite a bit for us later on.  Everyone arrived in the early afternoon and we had lunch and then started working.  The bigger kids and guys worked on the flower beds in the back and the younger kids and a few of the gals worked on the one in the front yard.

Everyone worked really hard and we ended up getting a lot more done than I had hoped for.  We did have one casualty though.  Our niece's husband lost the nail of his big toe.

All in all it was a great experience and we are very grateful for all of the help we have been given.

Braden