It's an emergency!

That's what Connor said earlier this week. We had just come home from a "Christmas Hunt" (where we drive around looking at the Christmas lights), parked the car in the garage and sent Connor up to his room to get his jammies on. Not two minutes later, he came running down the stairs yelling "mom, dad, it's an EMERGENCY!" Ammon asked what happened and he said "the tree fell down" and proceeded to open the front door to show him. Ammon followed thinking it was only a few branches that had fallen off but no, he was right- our front tree had blown down, roots and all!! (Connor was able to see it fall from his bedroom window. He thought it was cool and even asked us to "do it again!")

The weather was very windy and later that night, we received a lot of rain. We knew the tree was dead. In fact, almost weekly, we have had landscapers come by and offer to take the tree down- for a few hundred dollars. "No thanks" we'd always say. We knew it needed to come down at some point but we never imagined it was weak enough to be blown over. It had some obvious termite damage and so we figure that's what finally killed the thing and all it needed was a strong wind to wrench it out of the ground. That's exactly what happened; we're just lucky it didn't fall on the house! It did, however, fall into the road. So, Ammon and I, and later a friend, spent a few hours hauling the branches out of the road, driveway and sidewalk.

The canopy of the tree amazingly covered almost both lanes of traffic in front of our house! Here's Ammon standing in the road showing how far out the tree fell.
Surveying the house, minus the tree. He's standing where the tree had fallen out into the road. Check out the enormous grub we found in the roots of the tree! (the green-white thing coming out of the bottom left of the picture)

Here is all of the canopy that we drug into our backyard. Ammon's been cutting it up all week for firewood. The saw-z-all we received as a Christmas gift last year from my family has been so great for this! Thanks again for the perfect gift for us do-it-yourselfers.

Cutting up the huge trunk with a chain saw.

Ammon was actually a bit excited that the tree fell for him rather than having to cut it down. The kid loves to make fires in our fireplace and scavenges all year round trying to collect fire for the upcoming cooler months- he'll help anyone take down a tree and even searches Craig's List for postings of "free wood", which usually means 'come cut my tree down and keep the wood' but he loves it! He says he loves the physical labor, which is a nice break from his job.