Poco Mountain Girl

There is an air of excitement in our neck of the woods.  For the first time since we moved here last September, we’re having visitors!  (hehe…pathetic, I know.)  Our friends are coming from Kansas City and Nebraska to hang out with us here.  Four adults and four kids, and they will be here four days. My best friend Darcy is coming, whom I haven’t seen in over 2 years.  We’ve each had a baby since then.  “Grandma” Cindy (who helped with both Zia’s and Cash’s births) will also be here.

Obviously, we like our way-out-in-the-mountains life of solitude–but we are so excited to be seeing human faces again. (Just kidding, of course. We see the lady at the post office every now and then.)

All joking aside, we’re thrilled, and suddenly we’ve become extremely busy–cleaning, staining, digging, planting, building, sewing, baking. Not exactly because we’re having visitors, since these are all things we like to do and have planned to do, but suddenly we have the unction to actually do them.

Like cleaning these windows.  When the window-cleaning man finished, the whole house was brighter!

It’s hard to see in this picture (taken in April) but our deck and rails were getting really worn.  The Colorado weather isn’t kind to decks, with all its sun and wind and snow and moisture-sapping dryness.

David power washed the deck, stained it with a transparent natural stain, and re-stained the rails.

He did an amazing job, and it looks so much better.

He also re-stained this retaining wall and planted flowers in the barrels at the bottom.

This area where David is standing is at the top of the retaining wall.  It used to be a couple of goldfish ponds.  I’m sure it would have been nice if we cleaned them out and turned on the built-in waterfall, but it was too much water and too deep to have with a toddler bumbling around.  I was constantly thinking about it whenever our door was open (which is all summer), and checking to make sure Cash wasn’t near it.

David pulled out these tubs that lined the ponds, ordered a load of dirt, and (with Zia’s help) spent the next two days carrying bucket loads of dirt up the steps to fill the hole.

Now we have a nice area for a flower garden–and no insidious lurking pools of slimy water.  We also have a very tired man.  (He is amazing, have I mentioned?)

This is our little fire pit in a picture I took last fall.  We had cleaned it up nicely, pulling out debris and raking all the coals (and hundreds of rusty nails) into a nice pile.  Our plans were to put a garden in…

until we realized it still looked like this in April.  We realized we needed to change our plans, and so we’ve decided to keep the fire pit, but make it a little cozier.

I pulled some sticks out of the woods and built a teepee.  We dug out the old coals and nails, and lined the pit with rocks.

We needed some chairs, so David brought over some logs from a tree he cut this spring–and voila! enough seats for ourselves and eight visitors.

I sewed some sewed fabric scraps together to cover the teepee, and we made it nice and cozy inside…all set for an influx of little banshees.

We’ll have three birthday celebrations this weekend–Zia’s, mine, and Grandma Cindy’s.  Birthday cakes are coming out of the oven every so often (and also out of my ears, hehe.)

And now, it’s almost pow-wow time.  Aaaaeeeeeeoooooo!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2014 at 8:26 am and is filed under Amigos y Familia, General, Home Sweet Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.