The Good List: I'd say we've been a little busy

* there are way too many spaces in this post. I have already spent hours on this blog and don't have the patience to figure out how to get rid of them right now...maybe later.....*

So here's a little update for the last few months and the reason why maybe I haven't posted since baby Jake was born.
The last half of this year has been um, a pain.......with scattered silver linings :).

My blog is called "the good list" so I feel obligated to point out the good. But it has really been pretty ridiculous and I want to document it, even if it's not exactly uplifting.
It all started Aug 13th (two days before Jacob came). I think I'll do this in list form with bullets to make it easy to follow.

Aug 13th. Tub got too full - overflow valve leaked. Water under the tub, floor, dripping through the family room ceiling. It was a Saturday night. Nothing to be done until Monday.......

Aug 15th - Monday. Jacob came :) Joy - tiny little cutie - perfect baby boy.

Aug 17th - Return home to a house smelling of mildew. Ins. guy shows up to assess. I am upstairs with Lauren and the baby, feeling unfit to see anyone, having just had a baby!! De-humidifier placed in family room to dry ceiling. Constant Noise.

Aug 18th - Air conditioning quits on us. In AUGUST! Dave places fan on kitchen counter surrounded by bottles of frozen water piled on top of each other for make-shift A/C unit. Guy comes to check moisture in ceiling - dry- phew. De-humidifier gone. Yay!!

*silver lining*......Lauren entertains herself for hours in "sand box" Dave created for about $10 with a few bags of sand and a bucket of sand toys.

Aug 18th - HVAC guy shows up at 10 a.m. New part, $475 later A/C works!!!

*silver lining*.......A/C was repaired w/in one day and I could finally wrap newborn baby Jacob in a blanket!!!

Aug 18th - Tractor guy Wade shows up to scrape our side yard free of bull-thorn, AKA "sticker plants" infested gravel. Dave makes an appearance for a quick drink after paying HVAC guy and goes outside to direct Wade.

K- that all happened days after we brought home a new baby. Dave took the whole week off, but was not really with me much. I guess the silver lining is......what a blessing to have so much paid time off, and nice that these things all happened while Dave was home so I didn't have to deal with 4 different male strangers in all my post-delivery glory!

I'm just getting started :)In September Dave started having incredible, debilitating back pain! :( It lasted about 2 weeks. He walked around hunched over like an old man and would come home from work and lay on his back all night. He had several M.D. , chiropractor and physical therapist visits and courageously went to work every day enduring the pain. Life at home was tricky. Lots of balancing of kids, obligations, and emotions!!!

In the midst of the back pain, we had to prepare the townhouse for new renters, have the car and truck repaired, Jacob had a little eye infection and then I got mastitis!!! We completely forgot Dave's dad's birthday and my grandmas birthday and pretty much lost all capacity to be responsible and consider others at all!

*silver lining*......Dave finally found an incredible chiropractor who took a slightly different approach and pretty much cured the pain with one adjustment!!!!! What a blessing!

*silver lining*.....The harvest!! We were completely overwhelmed with produce from our garden! We couldn't keep up with it all! We had so many cantaloupe, a random honeydew that showed up, plentiful grapes (delicious, fresh from the vine), tomatoes, yellow summer squash, cucumbers, beets, green beans, our own lettuce, pears from mom, and 6 eggs a day from the chickens. So blessed!

*silver lining*.....Heavenly Father let me know I wasn't forgotten....The day my whole body ached & I felt miserable from mastitis was the day a good friend happened to plan - a few days earlier - to bring dinner. What a welcome tender mercy. The dinner was delicious and the timing could not have been better. She had no idea I was sick. Not a co-incidence.

Okay, moving right along.

So one day - some time ago, I happened upon a blog where the girl talked about the wonder of water and how it can entertain kids. She had decided to make cleaning the kitchen floor fun by letting the kids strip down and "skate" with rags on the soap and water she poured on the floor. I decided this would be fun for Lauren. I'm trying to be more light-hearted and fun as a mom. I wish I had had a voice screaming in my head, "DON'T DO IT!!!!!!!" Oh nothing went wrong that day, it was kind of fun, but I suffered the repercussions weeks later (in October) when Lauren decided to repeat the experience on her own in the bathroom upstairs.

I was finishing up on a phone call and placing a Shelf Reliance order for a customer online. I had already gone upstairs once to turn off the water in the tub and didn't want to interrupt the call again, though I heard water splashing on the floor. "I'll deal with it later, I have to get this done," I thought.

Little did I know...............................

When I went upstairs after hanging up, Lauren had completely covered the bathroom floor with buckets of water (her little blue sand bucket).

"I'm skating mommy!" was what I heard.

Oh boy.

What I saw was a floor covered with water which took every towel in our house to soak up. Water that leaked through the floor, and then through the family room ceiling....again. Remember the leak that happened right before I had Jacob?

This water, this "skating" experience, which idea originated from a mother just trying to have fun with her toddler, caused $6,500 in damage!!!!!! (according to the ins. estimate).

Well, another call to the insurance. Another visit from the disaster mitigation company. Several visits, actually, as 7 industrial fans and 2 de-humidifiers were placed and left for 5 days and checked on daily. We still hadn't replaced the ceiling from the first leak, and now we got another hole cut out in the kitchen ;) fun times.
The vanity, toilet and tile floor were ripped from the hall bathroom and a row of tiles removed from an adjoining wall in the master bathroom.

Did I mention the fans? 7 big blue industrial fans running 24/7 in a home with a 3 year old and a brand new baby!!!!!!!!!! Sorry, not much silver lining here, unless you consider this some kind of super powered white noise. It was really loud. One of the best days this half of the year was when they told us it was dry and they could take out those dang fans.

Well, we have a gas fireplace in our family room - in the corner - which really limits the placement of furniture in the room. We've never really liked it and have maybe turned it on once since we've lived here. So Dave starts thinking: "our house is torn apart anyway - we could rip out the fireplace and repair the corner at the same time as the holes in the ceiling! Now is the absolute best time to do it! Let's do it!" So we did. He did. He took out the fireplace and demolished the corner of our house.

Then we had daily visits from the drywall guy. Lots of pounding, lots of dust from sanding the mud and a cluttery, messy house.

NOW IT GETS REALLY INSANE.

Before the drywall guy even finished, I was actually allowing Lauren to wash her hands at the kitchen sink, unsupervised. (I was feeding Jacob in the living room) I asked her several times to turn the water off and get down. When she didn't respond, I finally went it to turn it off myself and found the faucet turned backwards and water running behind the sink, off the counter and all over the floor. That's when poor Lauren got to see her mom lose it. I cried. I called my dad bawling, I called my brother bawling. I even tried the next- door neighbor (luckily they didn't answer, but I really didn't care who heard or saw me in this state. All I could think of was getting that water off the floor!!!!!!!) Dave had been out of town all week and was returning that night. Everything had gone according to plan. The house was clean and I was ready to welcome him home in a cheerful mood..............until this. Now, instead he got to come home to a frazzled, mascara streaked face, a pile of sopping wet towels on the floor, and a shop vac full of water and whatever else was in there from cleaning up the sheetrock mess. This is our dishwasher pulled out so they could check for moisture under the cabinets. See the drywall guy in the background?

So, now our downstairs renters, my wonderful brother and his cute, patient wife, get visits from the disaster mitigation company, a hole in their ceiling and daily visits from the drywall guy, who, by the way, was happy to have the work :).

The saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, we painted the corner of the family room where the fireplace was and the ceilings in the kitchen and family room. On the following Tuesday, we ripped out the carpet in the family room and from the stairs and painted the baseboards in the family room and all the trim in the entry way - which had never been painted white. While at Home Depot, to grab a gallon of white paint, Dave calls to let me know he's decided to re-build the top section of stairs, since they've always been too shallow and they creak. So 5 minutes before they close, I have to ask them for 16 feet of heavy lumber (stair tread), two tubes of construction adhesive, and a box of screws, all of which I somehow have to fit in our little Honda. Always the opportunist, my husband :) The Home Depot associates were very helpful and very patient.

By Wednesday, we had new carpet. And the room looks AWESOME. It made it all worth it!

Is this post long enough for ya?

Here is the silver lining from all of this:

#1: You can all learn from my mistakes. (Don't let your kids "skate" on your kitchen floor, don't leave them alone in the tub (common knowlege, obviously) and don't let them wash their hands unsupervised.)

#2: After much work and many late nights, we have heavenly new carpet, a whole new room with a sweet furniture arrangement now that the fireplace is gone, and bright white ceilings. My husband has incredible skills for which I am so grateful.

#3: The disaster mitigation crew was awesome. They were friendly and polite and very professional. When you have to see strangers so often in such circumstances, it's nice when they're pleasant to work with.

The bathroom still has to be put back together. Dave is going to do the tile himself and he's pretty excited.

So there's one way to re-model two rooms in your house, though I wouldn't recommend it.

Then there's the Hurricane-like windstorm that struck two nights ago and ripped off siding, shingles and destroyed our fence..............I'll get to that later.

Here are some pictures of other things we had going on in the midst of it all: