More snow

My husband has outdone himself this time. We had another snow this weekend. Scott blew the yard onto the existing pile. It is now well above my head!

Chess

One game I never learned. And I reserve the right to remain ignorant so I am not roped into being the partner whenever someone has a whim.

As a result, the entire family plays chess except me.

Just now Isaac and Caleb are enjoying a round. Caleb announced, "check," and Isaac replied, "check what?"

Seriously, Isaac can play through pretty well and hold his own for a little while. He knows what to call everything, and can even set up the board- which is more than I can do. He does occasionally mix up names, like castle for rook or horse for knight.

Our snowstorm

This is what we got from our snowstorm. Scott took the mower deck off at 5:30am and snowblowed the driveway- and the front yard- to create the much desired snow mountain. The bitter cold doesn't stop the kids from playing outside now. After dinner it was 10 degrees, but they begged to go out. The 10 minutes I gave them turned into 45! They weren't even cold!

Pine trees

In the midst of the creek bank excitement we had a project of our own going on at home. Time to take down the pine trees between us and the East neighbor to do some excavating for drainage in preparation to pour concrete in the garage.

Here are some "before" pics.

More boulder watching

The dumping and stacking went on for several days, and it was fun for all of us to head to the park and watch progress.

Huge dump truck

Isaac and I knew well the sound of the big dump truck pouring out its load of huge stones across the creek. We also knew that after the first dump of the day we could ride our bikes down to the park to watch the next load in two hours.

We made a game of making it there to witness the dumping, and we enjoyed watching the payloader line them up along the creek bank to create walls there.