All Decked Out

Have I mentioned how handy my husband is?  He gets it from his father. If you've been reading this blog for a while, then you've probably read about how Mr. Hartley made this cradle for Tate and our beautiful dining table.  Thankfully, he passed these skills down to David. A couple of years ago, I wrote this blog post about the sofa table he made for us.  He has since then made a cabinet for our kitchen, but will posted at a later date.  For now, I want to show you his BIGGEST project thus far, our deck!

Our deck has been a sore subject since we moved into the house.  We knew it would need replacing when we bought the house, and that urgency became even greater once we had a child.  Neither one of us liked walking on it barefoot for fear of getting splinters (and that fear actually coming true), so we knew we did not want Tate playing on it.  Once he became mobile last fall, it became evident it had to be done before summer of 2010.

So in April, David set out to conquer the rotten deck.  (You didn't think he would actually pay someone to do it, did you?)  I wanted to help, but was forced to watch Tate while he was awake.  That meant I could asssist David for about 2-3 hours, tops, per day while the little stinker napped.  Needless to say, I barely did anything but put my 2 cents in.  David did get a little bit of help from Shawn and our neighbor across the street, but did 90% of the work on his own.  We didn't do a complete overhaul (our bank account thanks us), but extended it 3 feet and resurfaced the deckboards.  And I must say, I think it is impressive.  :)

Oh, and I must mention that with the leftover wood, David made a picnic table for Tate (that's big enough for adults too).  Here's some pictures we took during the process.  Please excuse the feather wreath in the "after" photos.  I was getting ready to host a baby shower.  Now, I promised to sand and/or pressure wash the old stain off the outside joists.  Ugh.

Mr. Sweats A Lot

Let me start by saying this is sort of a test. My new phone has a blogger app so I wanted to try it out. Here's a pic of Tate after being in the heat for all of 5 min.

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Anniversary Trip

We celebrated 10 years of marriage this year back in June and had planned on taking a special trip to celebrate.  In typical Hartley fashion we were about two months late past our anniversary.  Tate's Mimi and Pop were nice enough to offer to come keep Tate at our house for the 5 days we were gone and did a great job.  We finally decided on San Juan, Puerto Rico since it seemed to be a nice beachy place to go with some interesting things to see as well.  As it turned out we had a lot of fun but it did pretty much rain every day we were there for a good amount of the time.  A lot less pictures were taken since we were without Tate.  Most pictures were from a day when we went to see Old San Juan and El Morro, the old Fort out there that was pretty interesting.

Here are some pictures from our journey...

What would you do for free Chick-fil-a?

We started a tradition last year when Chick-fil-a had their "Cow Appreciation day".  If you dress up like a cow, you get free food.  Well of course we did it.  We Hartleys will do what it takes for a discount, especially when you are talking about free Chick-fil-a!  So we took a couple pictures with Mandy's phone (sorry for the lower quality).

We told Tate to stand still for the picture and he took us very seriously.  :)

Family picture helps explain the sign Tate had on. :)  Yes, we ate for $0 that night.

Happy 234th Birthday America!!!

So... yes, I know we are about a month plus late on this one but its a rainy day and we are catching up on some blogging finally.  We are trying to get back in the habit.  As we celebrated our nation's 234th birthday we had a good time having an all American celebration with BBQ, family fun and fireworks.  We had a great day and here are a few pictures from the outing.

 My trusty assistant and I as we smoked ribs earlier in the day.  As you can tell he worked up quite a thirst slaving over the hot smoker.

 Tate being his silly self as usual and telling us all about something of which we probably couldn't understand.

Mom and Tate showing off their matching American flag shirts and waving the red white and blue.

Dad and Tate (also matching shirts, you can't beat $5 flag shirts from Old Navy).

Mom and Tate out at a school near the place where they do the big fireworks show at the Vulcan every year.  Of course far enough away that its not loud and scary for some people.

Family portrait here taken of ourselves. Tate ended up enjoying the fireworks but from the safe haven of his Momma's lap where he sat very still.