Mud Fight!

We are leaving town to poke fun and laugh at Cathy who is turning 50. Since the weather is taking a turn for the worse, and by that I mean hot, we figured it was time to turn on our sprinklers so the lawn doesn't look any worse than it does now when we get back.

Now is the part in the story where we drift backward in time a few months. When the snow all melted and we were able to go out into our mess of a back yard, we noticed that there was a hole about 8 inches in diameter and about 1 foot deep. This seemed like a strange thing to have happen until we noticed that it was right next to a sprinkler. The most immediate thought was we have a broken sprinkler pipe, crap! Never the less we decided to fill the hole with dirt, and to plant seed a bit later in the spring.

Now back to last night. Since we were going to have the sprinklers running we figured we should do our due diligence and make sure that they were all working. We turned on the water to the system and started going through them one at a time. The first two stations were just fine, but of particular importance because we are pretty sure they over watered and killed our little tree in our front yard. After a few quick observations and a short discussion about which sprinkler heads needed to be changed out, we moved on. It wasn't until we came to station 5, the last station for our small system, that we found the problem. We were all on the back deck checking out the coverage when we noticed the dirt we filled the hole with was bubbling. The immediate reaction was CRAP! So out comes the shovel and away we go down the road of sprinkler pipe repair.

The leak was not hard to find, but it was a pain to repair because it was at a T junction, and was right next to another pipe that had a sprinkler coming off of it. It took a few hours to get everything dug out, cut, put together, tested, and buried.

Now for the point of this whole blog, since we are fully aware none of you care about our sprinkler woes. While all of this was going on, our little helpers decided they wanted in on the action. Of course they have not played in mud before, so were hesitant to do so now. A little encouragement from mom and dad and they were right in there having a blast. They went from not liking mud to being more mud than skin in a short amount of time, as the picture at the top of this blog indicates. Of course there was little helping to be done, but there was lots of mud to be played with! Just so you all can see how much fun they had...and how dirty they were getting, here is a short clip of the event.