Friday Family Fun: All Fun and Games Until Mom Busts the Tire

Let's just get the bad news over with, shall we? I popped a tire on the Honda.

Yeah. Like, completely wrecked it.

I don't have a great excuse for this. It was mostly stupidity. We were all up at our new house. The van was parked behind the Honda, and I didn't want to have to maneuver around it, so I went forward. Unfortunately, in front of me was the concrete ramp that leads up to this mechanic's pit thing in front of the shop. I thought the high curb was further towards the house. It wasn't.

The offending curb, now more crumbling than it was.

A. came running over when he heard the bang of me hitting the curb. He directed me to pull far enough forward so the Honda was on flat ground. Then he spent some time getting off the spare from under the Honda and changing the tire. He was quite kind about this, noting that two of the four tires had slow leaks (though OF COURSE not the one I ruined) and we were probably due a new set of tires anyway.

A. had to stay up at that house to wait for the guy who was coming to look at installing a dishwasher for us (hooray!), so I left the wounded Honda with him and loaded all the children in the van to drive home with my figurative tail between my legs.

Not so fun.

However! Before that we had SO much fun!

We ran the rolling magnet to pick up more of the hundreds of nails that litter the back pasture of our new property.

The boys love doing this. Better them than me.

This same pasture is also littered with broken glass. It's all thick glass without really sharp edges, so it can be picked up without injury, but there is so much of it. SO MUCH. A. thinks some previous owners used that area to dismantle the wooden houses in town for scrap wood. And possibly do a lot of beer drinking out of bottles so they could use the bottles for target practice. So the back pasture* is pretty much the remnants of a junk yard.

Lovely.

I started picking up the glass. Cubby and Jack took turns helping me when they weren't using the magnet. After about an hour and a half of stooping and crouching down to pick up many, many handfuls of glass, we had picked up about a gallon. 

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, right? Right.

This was obviously not ideal territory for a crawling baby, so while we were picking up nails and glass, Poppy was chilling in her stroller.

With the occasional re-positioning by her brothers.

And what was A. doing while the rest of us were occupied with junk? He was planting the world's longest row of garlic outside of an actual farm.

I was standing at the start of the row to take this photo, and there's Farmer A. waaay down there at the 

end.

After we'd all done enough labor to feel the need for re-fueling, there was much hand-washing and then the traditional Fun Friday picnic lunch.

Because everyone knows Fridays aren't fun unless you eat lunch outside.

So that was this week's Fun Friday, which unfortunately ended on a distinctly Unfun note. Boo me.

* It's a bit generous to call it a pasture, as it doesn't have any grass. It's too big to be a yard, though, and it is all fenced in with some old animal pens in it, so I'm going with pasture.