A couple of days ago I spent some quality time with my father in law...moving 6000 pounds of dirt, rock and turf. Good times eh?
Here's what happened. My sister and partner bought a house. The house has some ISSUES. The biggest one right now is the perimeter drainage. And let me tell you, I have talked more about drainage these past few weeks than I care too. Part of putting in perimeter drainage is removing all the dirt around the foundation of your house. Which, by the way, is a stinkin' huge amount of dirt! So for the past month or so, my sister has had huge mounds of dirt sitting in their front yard. Not so pretty. So on Monday, me and Dad decided to do something about it.
A word about my in laws...they are pretty awesome. I'm not gonna lie, when I first met them 15 years ago, they scared the sh@t out of me. They had come down to the ghetto where me and Hubby(who was not my hubby at the time) were interning. Shortly after that, Hubby brought me up to a family gathering. We walk in and everyone stops talking to look at us. This is saying quite a bit because Hubby's clan is LOUD! And there are a lot of them. To say that I was a little intimidated is a bit like saying giving birth hurts just a little bit. As we left the gathering, Hubby's Beppe (grandmother) and matriarch of the family looked me, grabbed my face, kissed me straight on the lips and loudly announced that she liked me, that I was good for Hubby and that I should come back. ( a side note, Hubby's clan are kissers...but that is a whole other post!) It also probably helped that I come from Dutch stock as Hubby's parents are 100% Dutch, off the boat as children. Of course, because my parents immigrated as adults, I like to say I'm actually more Dutch since I speak/understand the language and grew up going to Holland and Hubby went for the first time with me after we were married.
I digress.
So, Monday we announced to Mom and the girls that we are going to do the dirt moving and it shouldn't take too long. Famous last words. We head over to my sister with a borrowed trailer and start shoveling the first load. In about 45 mins we realize that this trailer is not going to work. But we had already loaded it with dirt. So I get on the phone and called a rental place, we head over there to pick up a new trailer. Then we need to take the dirt out of the first trailer and move it to the second trailer. Then we find out that the landfill won't take this dirt. So we have to find an alternate place. I find one, call them and get the address to dump the dirt. Not until we are driving around an industrial park do we realize that they gave us the wrong address. I call back and they are apologetic. They gave us their HQ address instead of the dump site address. Brilliant. Turns out, the dump site is just across the river from us, instead of almost into the city. So after almost 3 hours, we finally offload our first load. Back to my sister's house for the second load, did it in an hour. By this time we were already past our time that we had promised Mom and the girls, so we headed back to the house. It was empty, so we made lunch in 5 mins and booked outta there so we wouldn't incur the wrath of the girls and Mom. After loading up the third trailer full, we were both moving slower. We looked at the never ending pile and decided that it was just too bad, the rest was my sister's problem. The final tally from the wieght scales was 5989 pounds of dirt...which really is like us moving 12 000 pounds since we had to both load and offload the dirt each time.
Up until this point of our 13 year marriage, I have never spent that much time alone with my father in law. He worked a lot up until this past year as a big boss electrician building huge hotels and various other buildings. He is an amazing Pake (grandfather) to his six grand kids, a very supportive father to his four kids and three daughters in law and loving husband to Mom. He told me when Hubby and I got serious about getting married that not calling him Dad was not an option and that I needed to get over it. He is generous to our family and makes sure we know that we are an integral part of the clan though we are separated by 3 provinces. We share a love of reading and a competitiveness around card playing. And we bicker with each other a lot.
Hubby is a lot like his dad. This has become more obvious over the years, and now especially since Hubby is in construction. Watching the two of them ponder drainage at my sister's house made me realize what a good family I married into. Not because of their exceptional building skills, but because of their work ethic, commitment to family and faith and their enjoyment of life in general.
By the end of the day with Dad, we were speaking in the same tone and rhythm of each other and we still can't move without some sort of join and muscle pain..but I wouldn't trade my day with Dad for anything. Except maybe for a massage.
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