Basement Walls and Gingerbread

We have basement walls! They got poured on Monday, right before this massive cold snap we're going through. 

The black coating is the waterproofing on the outside of the walls, in this picture the front door will be about in the middle of the picture, in the part that is coming toward the viewer. 

And the second picture is looking at the garage on the left. I'm facing east in taking these pictures. 

Ryan has also been working on putting in water lines, here he's standing in a water line trench, putting in a hydrant.

This last weekend we also had a very wintery activity and we made gingerbread houses with Grandma and Grandpa.

Z happily played with toy cars while we did.

And then we decorated them, of course.

Little Z turns 2 tomorrow, so since he is otherwise underrepresented in this post, here he is outside Target, very disappointed that the big red ball doesn't move:

Happy Birthday little man!

Poop

Sometimes being a farm wife is about poop. I spent about 4 hours today helping Ryan chase cows onto our trailer, and he took two loads out to the new farm. The third load is on the trailer now to be taken out tomorrow, and we have one more load to go after that. Today I learned that cow poop is a very slippery substance, but I managed to not plant myself in any of it. Ryan did manage to get too close to a cow in the close confines of the trailer and was less lucky. I also came in from one of these herding sessions to a very dirty diaper on my son, hence my revelation. At least the majority of the cattle are moved, but that last load could be a real bear.

The other poop-related thing that happened is that we got our septic on-grade lines installed. These are like laterals, but not buried because the new farm's soil is heavy clay without much drainage. We were supposed to have a basement dug on Friday or Saturday, but that didn't actually happen. So here's the picture of the on-grade lines before they get covered with dirt:

In other farm news, on one of the trips today the cows did this to the trailer lighting wires:

If you remember, our trailer lighting was already pretty jury-rigged. So Ryan brought home a new connector and we now have a more sophisticated jury-rigged trailer light set! This time around we had enough slack to run the wires along the top of the trailer, with ny-ties holding it in place and the extra slack wrapped around. It's classy looking.

My caution toward doing my own work on my car is fading a little, at least with some tasks. I know, I know, I'm a mechanical engineer. But still, I don't touch my own car. But when a headlight burned out and was already cracked and yellowed, I decided I was going to replace it myself. It was going to cost me $180 in labor only to have a shop do it, so I turned to YouTube. Love YouTube, so very helpful in telling me where all the fiddly little clips and screws were. 

The result is a headlight that now matches the other one (it was always much clearer because Ryan hit a deer and it had been replaced last year) and works! Ha!

No sewing news this time because my machine is in the shop for 3 weeks. :-(

Halloween was this week, and I apologize for the terrible pictures of my kids. H was Belle, and Z was a cowboy. 

H did fine with the whole trick-or-treat thing, and Ryan even made up a joke for her:

Knock Knock

Who's there?

A Kid.

A Kid who?

A kid who wants candy!

It went over pretty well and we did have about a half dozen people ask for it. 

With Z we mostly focused on "Thank you" and "Bye", he doesn't have the Trick-or-treat down at all. He also pronounces "Bye" with a "D", so was waving and cheerfully yelling "Die!!" at people all night. 

All in all, a pretty good time was had by all, but Z wanted to ride in another kid's red wagon so badly that it was apparently tantrum-worthy.