what a day!

phew.

Sunday night we were looking forward to a wonderful Monday holiday. Kids were out of school, Huz was off work, projects were going to be completed, friends were coming to visit, fun was to be had.

And then, at 8 a.m., the phone rang.

It woke us up. It felt good to sleep in a little. The kids were still asleep as we hadn't arrived home until 11 the night before. (Huz was in the middle of a very intense game of Yahtzee with his family, I was trying to teach myself to follow a knitting pattern FOR THE THIRD TIME. haha.)

Anyhow, we didn't answer the phone, it went to the answering machine. We were still a little sleepy but what we heard shot us straight out of bed,

"Hi, this is your neighbors. We just woke up to 3 inches of water in our basement and wanted to make sure you were up so that you could check your basement."

Our basement is unfinished, but there are a lot of boxes down there that haven't been unpacked yet...

Huz hustled his buns down the stairs to check on the water situation. No water for us!!

Our poor neighbors had plenty of water to go around. One neighbor had 3 feet in his basement, another, 6 inches. A few other neighbors had the unfortunate raw sewage flooding. The problem, apparently, was that it was 45 degrees, raining, and 2 feet of snow melted yesterday!!! Yikes. The ground was just completely saturated with water and the water table rapidly rose flooding these houses from the ground.

I started doing my wifely, motherly duties (cooking, cleaning, clothing) and Huz went to help out the neighbors.

At noon he came home for a quick second. As he passed the stairway to the basement he noticed the door was opened. He went down the stairs to shut it. Very thankfully he noticed that we had started to flood. He started moving boxes out of the way and called up to me.

At that exact moment Three started screaming bloody murder. Because she tends to be (quite) dramatic, I didn't exactly rush over to her, but I did head that way. When I saw the blood dripping from her hand I started to hustle. (I'm starting to think I'm not reactive enough. When Two came home sick Thursday I decided to wait a day or two to see if she started to feel better. Instead, Two's ear drum ended up rupturing and the doc I took her to said that both ears were really infected and that the other ear would probably rupture. Nice one, mom) Back to the hand. Three had reached her hand into a aluminum can of mandarin oranges and sliced it on the way out. There was lots of blood but it wasn't as bad as I was thinking it might be. No stitches would be needed.

By the time I took care of the bloody mess and went down to check the basement, the water was coming up through the ground steadily. We had left our pump at our other house when we moved so Huz jumped in the car and headed to town to buy us a pump. In the meantime, my dear neighbor came over and she and I emptied out the food storage room and as many boxes from the basement as we could. We put the couch up on the ping pong table so that it wouldn't be ruined.

In the end we (meaning mostly Huz) were down in the basement bailing water until about midnight when it finally stopped coming up through the ground. Sounds like spring will be fun, huh?

A really nice lady brought our families (those of us who flooded) lunch and dinner which was really really really great. In my hurry to empty the basement of our boxes I piled the boxes in the kitchen blocking the pantry, fridge and stove about 4 feet high. I am sooo smart.

Although the day was not spent how we had planned, I really can't think of a better way to celebrate MLK, jr day than to be working together with friends for a good cause.