Tractor Rolling

This fun event happened in the end of August as well, but I felt that it deserved it's own post.

In order to get our house ready to put a fence up we decided that it would be best to rent a tractor and grade the yard to make it more level and even more importantly, to get out as many big rocks as we could.

Right at the end of the day while Landon was trying to hurry and finish before it got dark he started moving dirt from the empty lot behind us to fill in on the side of the house where we need to build it up to make it level. As he was doing so he got the tractor a little high-centered. He was just at the right angle that he wasn't able to get traction on the back wheels to move the tractor. Our neighbors were all outside watching their kids jump on our trampoline, so Jared, the friendly neighbor went over to help Landon.

Jared tried standing on the back of the tractor to see if they could get some traction, but it didn't work. Finally Jared suggested to Landon to go ahead and pull the tractor on down to his yard and not worry about backing it up. Landon told him he didn't want to dig up his yard, but Jared said it was fine. So, Landon began to pull forward onto the neighbor's lawn. As he did so he felt the tractor start to tip. Very slowly it tipped over and luckily Landon and Jared were able to both jump out of the way before it landed on its side in Bybee's yard.

We were worried about the tractor digging up Bybee's lawn, but instead we dumped hydraulic fuel and gasoline all over their lawn.

Jared and Landon stood like this looking at the tractor trying to decide how to remedy the situation for at least 20 minutes as I, Adrienne (Jared's wife), and Kayleen (our other neighbor lady) sat in the camp chairs behind them a little afraid to say anything. We did mention a few suggestions, but the men were not really in to hearing them at this point. So, instead Kayleen snapped some pictures so that we could later look at the incident and laugh. (As we are doing now.)
It was finally decided that help would need to be called in and Jared went to work finding someone in our ward that would know the best way to pull up the tractor and who might have the biggest truck to do so. (This had been suggested by the ladies 20 minutes earlier, but as I said, the men were not as responsive in the beginning.) Luckily they were able to come to our rescue immediately and hooked their truck up and yanked the tractor back upright and onto our drive-way. Again we got lucky in that we didn't break anything on the tractor. It started right up with the only problem being it was now low on hydraulic fuel.

Chalk it up to another embarrassing moment of the Ladwig summer where our fantastic and wonderful neighbors had to come to our aid. And hey, something really funny for us to chuckle about now.