Untangling Life: Patio Update

After the concrete dried it was time to stain it.

The concrete guy said he'd do it but he strongly (bless his heart) suggested that we do it ourselves saying it would be A LOT cheaper.

How right he was!

It took Matt about 30 minutes of his time for the initial overlay.

Tyler is proud of his Daddy's hard work.

Meanwhile, Lauren tried to fly her homemade kite in the absence of wind.

That quickly lost its thrill so she took to supervising the staining.

After the stain was applied we had to let it dry.

Lauren's idea was to make a picnic lunch and head to the park.

Great idea.

(I made some killer PB&J sandwiches. My secret: Mix the peanut butter with the jelly before applying it to the bread. It makes a world of difference and all for the better.)

At the park we made sure to have a pine straw and leaf fight.

(I won because I had the camera and no one is allowed to throw stuff at the camera.)

We tried to take advantage of the sun and use the timer to get a family picture but we didn't get it centered just right.

Unless!?...

We wanted to be-dazzle the picture and use PicMonkey to add in our friend Frosty.

Once we were back at home Matt added some gray stain to outline the joints.

After that we met some friends for dinner at Partners Pizza and had the fajita pizza but the kids had a five cheese pizza with feta and of course they all picked the feta off but they had fun playing in the pizza parlor playroom and then we all came back to our house to hang out and watch Oregon beat Stanford and hopefully get into the #1 BCS spot but unfortunately that didn't happen and the Ducks did not play like they should have and they lost to #15 or something Stanford and I was devastated - DEVASTATED and end of story, with one sentence, that's all I'm going to say about it.

The next day the kiddos put on clothes from their "give-away/too small" baskets so they could help paint the weathered and stained retaining wall.

Lauren looks smashing in whatever size she wears, right?!

(albeit, slightly uncomfortable)

Good work kids! We love us some child labor. =)

I could easily end the Patio Update here but I still have pictures on my camera so bear with me.

Since we start school so ridiculously early (first week of August) we get to take the entire week off for Thanksgiving.

To celebrate, today we met up with some friends at the new Skating Rink/Indoor Playground/Laser Tag/Arcade place. (It's only 7 minutes from our driveway so we LOVE IT!)

Tyler had fun although he chose not to skate today.

Q-T-Pi