Quick Trip to Iowa

We made a trip to Iowa this weekend to help Derek's grandparent's clean up their land. A storm with 104mph winds went through Iowa while they were in Hawaii.
G'ma & G'pa had worked at cleaning up all week and Brenda & Ryan went a day ahead of us and worked. But there was still a lot to do when we (along with Tyler & Lauren) got there.

We all got to work right away.


Derek and Tyler manned the chain saws...




While Brenda, Lauren and I loaded branches and logs onto the tractor...


Ryan and Grandpa hauled them over to the burn pile...

I think the final number of loads was over thirty!

There were branches driven into the ground...


Cooper was inside with G'ma, playing or sleeping most of the time...

He started army crawling while we were there. Now he's even more mobile! :)

But he did get a little tour of the yard and his first tractor ride...


He also came out to meet the frog Derek found...


We actually got done WAY faster than we thought from looking at the damage... Here's Daddy and Cooper after a long days work:


We saw G'ma & G'pa Mleynek on Sunday... they brought us sweet corn! Thanks! It's yummy!

Grandpa & Cooper even fit in a Sunday snooze.


We're glad we were able to go help out. It would have taken them a long time to clean it up...but with a few extra hands it went much faster. It's evident that God was protecting their place during the storm too. It's amazing with all the damage that there was only one branch down on a building and didn't hurt it much. There was one tree that broke off half way and the top half was on the ground... had it been the whole tree, the house would be crushed!