"Free" compost day

Since my parents/baby-sitters went to El Paso to see my sister for a long weekend, I took a few days off work to watch Madeline.  It just so happened that this is also "free" compost weekend in Lawrence, so Mathew took Thursday off as well. I think our little bright-eyed beauty was pretty excited to get to spend the entire day with her mommy and daddy...

After making sure the tires in the truck and trailer were nice and full of air (since compost weighs a lot), we headed to Lawrence.  We stopped at Milton's for a cup of David's blend coffee and a delicious scone before going to get our two giant scoops of compost.  The catch with "free" compost weekend is that it's only free if you scoop it yourself, which we usually do since we generally don't pay for something we can do ourselves. However, we had a feeling that Maddie would not be too happy about a 45 minute car ride to Lawrence followed by mom and dad scooping compost for probably another 45 minutes (at least) to load the truck and trailer followed by another 45 minute ride home.  That's a long time to be stuck in a car seat.  Therefore, we decided to bite the bullet and part with $20 in order to have the bucket loader drop an enormous scoop of compost in the truck and the trailer, which took all of about 2 minutes.  In this instance, I think our time is worth the $20.

By the time we got home, it had warmed up a bit and was a gorgeous afternoon.  We put Maddie in her stroller and bundled her up to watch us unload all the compost.  However, it took her less than 5 minutes to fall asleep... 

Last weekend, Mathew went outside to tear out everything (primarily weeds at this point) in our open garden.  After deciding that pulling everything was going to be a huge pain, he decided that spraying it all with roundup and burning it when it died sounded like a lot better plan.  Any excuse to get to play with fire :)  Here he was burning it today...

 The puppies always love it when we're outside.  I think they lay around 99% of the time when we're inside or not home, but they run and play non-stop when we're outside...

Except for Bailey.  She's a bit of a bum all the time.  It's a bit hard to see her in this picture, but she's up next to the house relaxing in the shade...

 Maddie took a nice time while we burned...

 Here's Edison trying to get Bailey to play...

 Farmer Mat...

 After burning what we could, it was time to unload our massive amount of compost.  At times like this , it sure would be nice to have a dump trailer.  However, unloading it is definitely a full body workout...

 Of course, after we had been unloading for about 15 minutes, Miss Maddie woke up and decided she was hungry.  I just love those big blue eyes...

At that point, her and I headed inside, and Mathew got to unload the remaining 3/4 of the trailer by himself.  After a long and busy day, we picked up a Papa John's pizza and had a nice and relaxing evening.  Days off sure are nice :)