Dirtwork, kids and ducks, oh my

We have had several fun outings in the last couple weeks. I have so many good photos of the kids and the beautiful Fairbanks summer and not enough time to download and write! But here are a few. These are photos of the kids at an outdoor wedding. It was a special time. We were on the edge of a beautiful green sloping hayfield, no houses around. Very simple, small group of folks. Handsome horses in the distances, lounging and browsing. We spent the night visiting, watching close friends get married, eating food, drinking punch and watching the kids run around in the hayfield, and the babies crawl around and off the blankets. Lovely time!

Avery has taken to climbing stairs as you can see in the photo above she is quite smug about her new found accomplishments. I can hardly keep her off of them. And she hasn't gotten hurt enough to know better yet. She has also climbed up onto a chair this week, very dangerous! And has also been caught pushing the stool around to things and then using it to climb up onto say the coffee table, etc. Very dangerous!
Flowers, ah... and ducks.... For a while I was letting the ducks out in the morning and leaving them out for most the day. However, they seem to relish my broccoli and cauliflower as much as I do. For a while they were not doing much damage. But as they've grown they went from nibbling on a leaf here or there to almost destroying whole plants. Now they just get to wander when we are in the garden, still once or twice daily. I think we have two girls and two boys and if that is the case we will be eating one male duck for dinner this fall.


In my last post I mentioned that some good friends of ours brought up their dump truck, skid steer and labor last week. In just a couple hours the men had taken down fifteen trees or so. We rented a bulldozer to take out the stumps and level the area to the west and south of our house. Our friend Bob did all of the work on the bulldozer while his son, Rob, and Dustin ran around cutting down trees, moving lumber, transporting equipment etc. Something about having heavy equipment around, progress happens quickly and drastically. Noah sat on either the front porch or the back porch depending on which spot gave him the best view of the bulldozer and the guys with chainsaws. I don't have a good picture of the cleared and leveled spot where the addition is going. It is below and to the west of the house. In the picture above Rob and Dustin are sawing up some trees. They had started on either side of the same tree but I was too slow to grab for the camera. They were sawing in woods as Bob was running the Bulldozer below them. Noah, Avery and I were hanging out on the back porch cooking dinner on the grill. Busy night. The bottom photo is of the newly cleared area south of the house. Our entire property is pretty much sloped woods. I am looking forward to having a small area close to the house that is somewhat level and grassy for the kids to play on. We also cleared this area as an access route to bring in supplies for the new building project and also as a way of clearing lumber and moving firewood. Thank you so much men for all your hard work. We truly appreciate you both.