When it rains AND it pours...

Yeah, so lots of fun in the Monster Maison these days. Good news is that I have internet as of this morning. :o) I am finally caught up on emails and Facebook, but I still have about 600 posts in my reader that I haven't looked at yet. Sigh.

I've been experiencing progressively worse knee pain lately. I know I've mentioned it before, but it is really getting out of hand. I limp everywhere now. Yesterday I decided to fight it and get some stuff done. Oh, what a joke. First, I "borrowed" my neighbor's internet so I could find some addresses of errands I needed to run. Then I went to Hallmark to find postcards for the boys to send to their classes. Hallmark doesn't carry Philadelphia postcards. But, the mail place 4 doors down did. Plus, it saved me from driving to the post office. 2 yr olds in any kind of store = ugh. I made it out without her breaking anything.

Then I got to wait in the AT&T store for 30 minutes so I could get a Philly number. Sugar was being anything but sweet. Oh, that girl! At one point she kept saying 'potty' so I asked one of the workers and she said, "we don't have a public bathroom, so I'll have to ask my manager" and then continued to talk to the customer. I finally grabbed Sugar, ran (as much as I could with my knee) to the manager and said, "Where is your bathroom for a 2 yr old emergency?" Notice, I didn't exactly give them option. I get Sugar on the potty, and she says 'done' without 'doing' anything. ARGH. Potty training is SOOOOO over-rated! Finally, it was my turn to be helped and I'm told I need to do it over the phone. GRRR....

Getting gas should be free of problems, but of course, the printer wasn't working at my pump and it said I needed to go inside. Like I'm going to drag 3 wild kids into a store with candy near lunch time, no thanks. Nor was I willing to leave them alone in the car while I went in. I left without a receipt. This was almost painful for me with my meticulous record keeping, but I just couldn't deal with the other options.

Then I decided to brave going to the bank. *shudder* I will say though, the bank personnel were AMAZING. They gave my kids all kinds of distractions, including Popsicles, and didn't seem even the slightest bit annoyed. I will be opening an account there soon. I was very impressed. They even told me where I could find a mail receptacle for the post cards.

But the real fun was that evening when I got a call from my realtor that the backyard was flooded. What a helpless feeling that is! I pretty much spent the next hour and a half trying to find someone who could help my realtor get the water out of the backyard and fix the sump. I guess the entire system floated out of the ground because it wasn't weighted down enough. Oops. The water got into the house too. So I called Neysa and since she is super strong and has a super strong hubby, they were able to move the furniture out of the water. It wasn't standing water, the carpet was just wet. Either way, bad to have furniture sitting in it...

Then I was on the phone forever this morning with water restoration people, the guy that is fixing the yard, my realtor, making my ortho appointment, etc. I think I have burned through half of my cell phone minutes in 2 days. At least I think everything is taken care of for now. I hope.

Oh, I looked up our home online after Sarah's comment. It was built in, drum roll please..... 1860. This house is almost 150 years old. So, fine, it isn't older than the discovery of electricity, but it is still old. :o)

I'll probably post again before my knee appointment. Now that I have internet and all. :o) And here are some pictures of Sugar's closet, I mean, room:

We squeezed in her crib for her baby dolls and yes, that is my wedding dress

The bookcase, dresser and wardrobe

this is the whole room...

yes, I realize the wardrobe takes up her entire room, but it needed to be

big enough for Sugar's clothes and all of the linens. Sheesh.

You aren't Job!

Quit trying to compete!

Sorry for the long read everybody. I just really really really needed the vent.

I just can't even believe my life. So ridiculous. While I obviously think I have nothing on Job, I can't shake the 'poor me' feeling right now.

I have about 5 loads of laundry to do. That isn't counting the bedding and towels I have from my renter who left yesterday and the one leaving tomorrow. I got the laundry started, but then dashed over to weigh in at the MWLC. I'm a little bitter about it because it takes an hour of my time when I could just hop on and off a scale in 2 seconds. Not too mention Odie's on board computer has been complaining lately that I need to get the oil changed. Of course. Then a quick trip to Blockbuster to return some movies. I came home and while unbuckling Stinker discovered that she had opened my box of chocolate shakes and bit some of the packages. She was quite the dusty mess. I get in the house and there was a message on my machine. Someone wants to look at the house! YEAH! I'm just thrilled! Get done answering some questions and such, and go down to switch out the laundry. And what do my eyes behold?? Water. All over the floor. Truly. I called my favorite plumbing people and they said they could send someone out between 2 and 4. Not too shabby. Then Roo's bus calls. Can he be ready 20 minutes early? The bus driver is in the area and would be late if she dropped off the other kids and had to come back. Sure, why not get him ready while all my stuff in the basement sucks up water. Truth be told, he was already completely ready, being the anxious boy he is, but I just couldn't leave him to get on the bus by himself. Come to find out the bus still has high schoolers on it. Ugh. Is it too late to change my mind? Don't panic, Melisa. This isn't a big deal. If nothing else, the kid knows how to scream. :)

You would think all of these phone calls with plumbers, interested buyers, bus depots, etc, wouldn't be that stressful, but every time I get on the phone, Stinky is screaming 'Daddy! Daddy!' and trying to grab the phone. Sad on so many levels, but still frustrating. It isn't always daddy on the phone.

If I'm going to be in the flooded basement, I should find something for Stinker to do. Well, it is nap time! Seeing as how she is on the tail end of illness, she is in the diarrhea phase. Lovely. Have I mentioned I've been super nauseous the last 2 days? Diarrhea doesn't help nausea. Just so you know. Change the second, oh so lovely, diaper of the day and get her down for a nap. Plumbers call to say they can come now. GREAT!

Head downstairs to start sorting through the disaster. Ugh. My poor friends are now sucked into my chaotic life. I think I mentioned we have a massive basement we aren't really using, right? So, I let my friend Natalie put some stuff down there before they moved. There is so much room down there, it wouldn't be in the way at all. And then I told Shannon she could hide a Christmas present there too. I won't say what since this is a public blog and kids could see it, but think super expensive. Not to mention all of the stuff I took down there when we started packing. And now there is a bunch of water. Gag. I start moving boxes to drier ground. And when I got to a wet box, if it was books or the like, I took them out to dry. THANKFULLY, most of the water was absorbed by the cardboard and the books got very little in the way of moisture. In all, we got away relatively easy. It didn't even get to Shannon's box. Hallelujah!

The plumber shows up and gets to work. Says the main line is backed up. Nice. Gets his big drilling tool and has at it. Tells me that flushable wipes (Kandoos) are in fact not flushable. They don't disintegrate like TP and shouldn't be considered flushable. Good to know! If there is a bright side to any of this, besides the damage to boxes being minimal, it is that the water that backed up was from the laundry, and not the toilets. Can I get a Hallelujah?! I was pretty grateful, let me tell you. It all cost a pretty penny. Especially considering I'm trying to figure out where we will get a first and last months rent for Philly while paying a mortgage in Lansing. Anyone want to rent a lovely 6 bedroom home? Sigh.

And in the midst of all of this, the fabulous missionaries came to help with my leaves. For some reason, having an open house, sick kids, becoming sick yourself, and then getting a flooded basement all while your hubby is out of state leaves very little time for raking leaves. Imagine that.

Lest you all think I am nothing but calm, cool and collected, I'll share another little tidbit with you. My curtain hanger on the door, isn't staying in. I tried to push it in, but no. So, what does any sane person do? They whack it with the side of their hand and try to force it in, right? Of course not. Here is another tip. If you are going to take out aggressions by hitting something, hit some smooth and flat and preferably soft. Do not hit something narrow and round and hard . I can't even write right now, though thankfully typing is still possible. Lovely. And if you even made it through this rambling recap of the last few hours, you will be rewarded with pictures on the cookie blog. They aren't up yet, but should be by the time you read all of this. ;)

And yes, I moved the boxes, vacuumed the water, and sprayed bleach before blogging. I'm not a total slacker.

Yikes! It's Ike!

This is a super long post. Sorry. Feel free to just look at pictures and get the idea. ;)

Michigan is no where near an ocean, so I haven't spent a lot of energy worrying about hurricanes. Perhaps I should have...

It rained all day yesterday. And when I say 'all day' what I mean is there wasn't a minute that it wasn't raining from when I woke up until 11 pm. Granted, I wasn't looking out the window all of those hours, so you'll have to take my word for it. Today is much the same. Constant rain. It hasn't always been a hard rain, though it does have its moments. But it has been sprinkling, raining, or pouring for 2 days now.

And now you are all dying to know how our basement is doing after last year and this year's flooding. (Don't worry Natalie! As soon as we hear the alarm go off, we'll get all of your stuff upstairs!)

To give you a little background, our basement was flooded when we bought it as a foreclosure. We had a double sump pump, and a water guard system installed. But then there was a storm last year that completely overwhelmed the system. There was a lake in our yard from the porch out to the trees. The sump pump just kept pumping into the backyard, which kept running into the basement. Obviously something had to change.

We spent countless hours and dollars putting in undergroud pipes. We have a large one (we are talking a foot diameter here) put at the bottom of a 60 ft long ditch. We then covered the pipe with rocks, so we wouldn't just have a huge ditch in the backyard. We connected all of the rain gutters and the sump pump to pipes that run out to the large pipe in the backyard. Then we built a berm (a small hill) so that the water wouldn't run into the yard once the ditch filled.

We didn't quite get the berm done in time, and a good sized storm that filled the ditch and came through our hole in the berm. We finished the berm and thought we were in good shape. We were wrong.

The next storm did great at keeping the water on the other side of the berm, but there was still tons of water on our side of the berm, with no way to get to the other side. Our next idea was to put a sump pump in the yard and run it into the ditch as well. It would have worked great last week, had Brad finished getting the electricity run out to it. Sigh.

Therefore, this is our first test of our new system. If this doesn't work, I honestly don't know what else we can do. At least there is an alarm on the basement system so we'll know before it starts to flood.

I have a couple of pictures on this blog, but if you want to see the slides, you'll have to log into the cookie blog. There are lots and lots. I took some originally, because I thought the water was so high, but it just kept getting higher and higher and higher, so there are multiple set of pictures.

Bad memories

Ugh. So another storm, and another lake in our back yard. Ahhhh! I'm running out of ideas here! At least the ditch kept all of the water from the gutters and the sump pump away from the house. That makes me happy. No we have to find what to do with the water that drains to the lowest part of the yard, which is unfortunately at the door of the walkout.

We were at Wal-Mart during the storm, and Brad found this hat he can wear for surgeries. He said he liked it because it reminds him of me. Awww.

Plethora of pictures

There are waaaaaay too many to add individually. You can pick which slide shows you want to see. I'll never know if you skip one anyway! :)

I feel the need to preface these pictures. Most of them are blurry to some degree or another. It irritates me to see, so I can only imagine how annoyed other people would be seeing them. Our camera is older than Daven, and if all our money weren't in the house, we'd probably buy a new one.

First we have J graduation from Kindergarten. He will be in school all day next year! Sigh... We sat in the very back, and we have no zoom, so it is really hard to see. Heavy sigh. It was sooooo hot too! I felt like I was in OK again.

Next up are the pictures of the sidewalk. We've come a long way! We hope to pour on Tues, but rain is complicating things. We'll just have to see. If you notice in the picture of the house (#7 I think), the tree has 2 trunks branching out. That is the tree that broke in the following storm pictures...


And here are the storm pictures. You thought I was kidding when I said we have water issues? I wasn't. Now you see the necessity of the ditch. And why we should have finished the ditch before starting on the sidewalks. (Check out the storm we had last year!) We only had one more down spout to connect to a pipe and run to the ditch. We even had the pipe laid (it has now floated off)! All we had to do was glue it together, drill a hole into the ditch pipe and then cover it all. Now we'll have to wait for the water to dry up. But it won't stop raining. Ugh. And I also wasn't kidding that we took down 20 trees. And now you see why too! I don't want all of those huge branches landing on my house! We cut down all of the trees closest to the house. Such a wise investment!


C provides a lot of entertainment for the family. She is such a cutie! She was playing with a can of soda for about 10 minutes before dropping it on a rock and then enjoying the resulting shower. The restaurant pictures are a great place we just found and fell in love with. SOOOO YUMMY! We asked to be seated on the train part. It was great. Right before we left, a train went roaring by on the track. The kids loved it! We were shaking! It was awesome!
I guess my jealousy is showing. I'm soooo tired of all of the brown and dirt in my yard that I went across the street and took pictures of my neighbors' yard. Technically, the house is abandoned months ago and a foreclosure sign was put up yesterday. I'm tempted to go steal all of the flowers since no one will care for them anyway (no, I won't). They have a cute pond that had a fountain too. But now the frogs have taken over. Most of these are blurry as well. Feel free to skip.

Okay, so those are the pictures in the last week. It has been really crazy this week, as you can see.

Lake Mons-ter

So, we had a huge storm that brought a lot of rain. Our basement actually flooded. Fun, huh. Here are pictures!