Our New Patio

I am so sorry for the weird half-done post that has been lingering here the last few days. I wanted to post about our new patio and Easter, and now I have pictures from Clint and Nicole's blessing of baby Maverick, but technology has betrayed me again and so some of that will have to wait.
I'll start with the concrete...
Rus and I have been looking for a van to replace mine for the last six months. We bought (and temporarily enjoyed) Big Mama, but decided we needed something that fit us better. (Not so big, easier on gas...) So we scoured craigslist and the newspaper and the lemon lot on base, but couldn't find a good fit. Then one day while Rus was bemoaning not finding a van and I was bemoaning not having a back yard, he came up with a brilliant idea - I drive his van, he buys a junker, we keep my old van until it dies (but don't really drive it because it's not reliable), and I GET MY BACKYARD!
Voila. He bought his baja bug, and I ordered concrete. We had the talented Armando and his crew come set up the forms and pour the concrete. I would give Armando nine out of ten stars...he lost one because he couldn't speak a word of English and so I had to have my lovely cousin Joy come be the translator. She was so wonderful to have herself and her kids here every time I needed to talk to Armando, and to be the go-between on the phone, and then to hang out all day when the men were pouring concrete.
So our new patio extends fifteen feet further into the yard than the old one. It runs the length of the existing one which is about twenty five feet. We also had a ten by ten pad poured right outside our bedroom windows because eventually we hope to put French doors there instead. We had a three foot wide sidewalk poured down the length of the house in Colonel's dog run so that he won't be tempted to dig up alongside the house. Also it makes it nicer for the kids when they have to clean up his poop.
The actual day of pouring was fun and interesting...just picture three moms (myself, Joy, and DeAnn, who thought she was joining us for an Easter egg hunt), and our collective ten children...then add in four Mexicans, a concrete mixer truck, and hundreds of square feet of "off limits" area directly between the kids and the wide open desert where the kids wanted to play. If you take that all into consideration, maybe you'll be surprised that the kids only stepped on the wet concrete four times. That's when I learned how to say "I'm sorry" in Spanish. Four times
Here are all of the pics of the event:

Here are some more pictures of the finished product:

 Our new patio outside our bedroom windows. I signed "Keri loves Rus 5 more" in the concrete on the right hand corner of the pad next to the house. Someday there will be french doors there so we can actually access the patio from our room. And someday flowers will grow and my sad lilac bush will look like a happy lilac tree.

 Another view of the patio. I would like to insert here that I am the digger of that beautiful trench you see. I spent a few hours a day for a few days digging that trench. I was determined to get it all ready so that Rus would lay the pipes for our future flower beds and fountain.
[And now that it has been weeks since I took that picture, I can happily tell you that the pipes are laid and just today we filled the trenches in with dirt. Raised flower beds - here we come!!]

 Here's a shot of the sidewalk that now adorns the inside perimeter of Colonel's dog run. It's nicer for the kids to walk on to pick up poop, and now Colonel can't dig up against the house. The kids signed their names on the concrete right next to the ac unit.