A Little Bit of Concrete Work

Today we did some real work: filling in the flower box in front of the windows. It was about four feet deep, so we carried bucket after bucket of stone up there and filled it almost up. The kids helped. Bekah shoveled the rock from a big pile into five-gallon buckets. Then the kids would drag the buckets over (with about one shovel-full of stone in them) and Mike and Mark took turns filling up another bucket and then carrying it up the ladder and dumping and spreading it in the flower box.
That was a lot of work, but the best (?) was yet to come. After filling the flower box about two-thirds of the way with the stone, we mixed up some cement. We used one 50-kg bag of Tolteca cement (that's 110 pounds, 3.7 ounces for you non-metric types out there), five buckets of volcanic sand, five buckets of gravel, and a few buckets of water. We mixed it by hand until we had a large pile.
Then came the really hard part: we shoveled the cement into five-gallon pails and carried it up the ladder on our shoulders and dumped it in the flower box. In this picture, Mike takes the first pail up and then he stayed up and troweled it smooth. I carried the rest of the concrete up. Talk about tired! I thought I was going to fall asleep when we were finally done!