Nadia often says, “Mommy, can we do a craft?” And after our long days on the road and in hotels I knew she would be asking soon after we were home again. So I broke out the playdough for Amelie for the first time. She thought it was really fun and I could tell she enjoyed mashing it around in her hands. I am amazed to say that she didn’t try to eat it; honestly I expected that she would since eating is her favorite past-time.
Then I introduced Nadia to a beading craft. The most popular name for these are Perler beads, but we bought ours at IKEA. The kids make the designs and then you can use the paper it came with or parchment paper for mom to use between the beads and the iron to melt them into place. Nadia worked very hard off and on until she finished the first one. She was very excited about the end result and has made some for gifts. Of course now I wish I would have snapped some photos of the ones we gave away, but too late.
The container of beads is giant so I know that Nadia will have many more hours of fun and I am sure her designs will get more and more complex. Fun inside activities to beat the Texas heat.
Click the photo above to see the entire album. One de-humidifier and 4 fans can be seen in this photo.
Janis took some in the middle of the night while the guys were working and then we took some when we returned home. At that point they had taken out some of the fans, but you can see the holes they drilled in the wall after they tore out the baseboards. They said in our room the water went up the wall about 6″. When Janis met them to test the humidity in the walls two days after they took out the carpet padding it was 8% in the good walls and up to 92% in the walls of our bedroom. Some of the other walls were 85%. The carpet downstairs is completely shot as is the flooring in our powder bath. We are very thankful that it didn’t get as far as the wood floors in the kitchen.
We have no idea when the leak started. We left for our trip on Thursday June 23rd. Mike’s cousin Janis came to check in on the house on Sunday, but would have had no reason to go in our room or bathroom and for all we know it could have been wet then. On Wednesday the 29th our neighbor got home from work and could see water seeping from the side of our house under our bedroom windows and pouring out of a spot on the corner. He immediately grabbed his tools out of his garage and turned our water off at the street. Then he banged on our door and when he didn’t get an answer he drove over to our HOA presidents house to ask him to call or email us to let us know what happened. That neighbor called me and we immediately called Janis to go over and check. Sure enough she could see that our bathroom, bedroom, closet and powder bath had definitely flooded. She could feel water in the living room also, but couldn’t tell how far it had gone. She returned later to meet Blackmon Mooring’s crew at midnight to begin hauling out the carpet padding.
Thanks to the quick thinking of our neighbor (who used to be a City of Fort Worth Water Leak Inspector) we didn’t lose a ton of stuff. It is such a blessing for us that he noticed. He told us that even though he left that job earlier in the year the habit of looking at people’s foundations hasn’t left him. Praise God for that. The water could have spread to the kitchen and messed up the entire downstairs. Words can’t express how grateful we are to him for just shutting off the water and looking for us later.
We had help from Steve at our church who went to the house to drain our waterbed the next day so that Blackmon Mooring could come back and get the rest of the carpet pad out. Grammie also came out to meet a crew from Blackmon Moorning. Many, many other people offered to help us since they knew we were on vacation. EVERYONE encouraged us to finish our trip and they could help oversee things. In the end it was good that we stayed because they had to turn the A/C off to get the house as hot as possible and we had no running water. If we had left early it just would have been that much longer in a hotel when we had already paid for the condo at the beach.
Once we returned home and checked into a hotel we headed over to the house to see the damage for ourselves. I was very happy to see that it was basically just a giant mess. The workers just got stuff out of the way to get the wet padding out and get the carpet drying. So our biggest job will be putting everything back in it’s proper place once the new flooring is in. I swept and vacuumed the main areas and that helped me a lot. Our DVD holder in the living room and our dresser are the only things that were damaged. Some of the flowers died and I will most likely lose my square foot garden because the water was off and is still off. We had a lot of stuff melt because the A/C was off and it was over 100 degrees in the house for days. Nadia loved smushing around the Costco size bag of melted chocolate chips before I tossed it. Quite a few things in my coupon stockpile melted, but thank goodness all that stuff was basically free.
That is as high as our thermostat goes. It must have been at least 105 in the house, maybe higher. It was 102 outside and we had to send the girls out to play to cool off!
So your next question is: What caused it? As of now the plumber thinks it’s a slab leak. He will be back on Monday with more sophisticated equipment to test. He turned the water on and asked us to use the house like normal for one day and keep an eye out. We all expected water to come pouring out when he turned it back on and it’s didn’t. As soon as I know the results I will report back.
As I said in my thankful Thursday post – my greatest gifts were with me at the beach. Everything else is just stuff which we shouldn’t hold on to so tightly anyway. Are the next few weeks going to be annoying dealing with repairs, insurance and everything else? Yes, but our life is still blessed beyond measure.
Thanks to everyone who offered to help us and poured out their love and time to us. And hey, we get new carpet!
I have seen these Download and Go unit studies by Amanda Bennett on other homeschool blogs, but hadn’t ordered one yet. When we planned our vacation I decided to buy Sunny Seashells and got everything ready. We didn’t start until Museum School and Chinese school were over so we would have time to just focus on this unit. I hoped it would get Nadia extra excited about our beach vacation and she did!
Click on the photo to see album
This is what we started with.
The unit is set up to be a 5 day learning adventure. We took a lot longer than 5 days because Nadia is at the low end of the age for these and I wanted her to enjoy it, not feel like it was information overload. Each day has book suggestions and videos links built in. I ordered about a dozen books from the library and we set the laptop on the table each time. There are family fun suggestions included and craft ideas. Each day had a “shell” of the day and Nadia liked some more than others. Each day also had a country of the day that was featured and Nadia would find them on the world map and color them in. My friend Cynthia from church brought Nadia a shoebox full of shells for us to use and then when she found out how much Nadia loved them she gave her the box full. Nadia was totally shocked, “MOM! Did you know that she gave me the whole box? Can you believe that?”
Looking at all the shells through the magnifying glass.
Spelling out vocabulary words with our tiles. Nadia is now hooked on pointing out things that are “transparent.”
The girls watching videos. Then Amelie showing me her shell while yelling “SEEEESHELL” (her variation of the word)
Nadia’s favorite video of the week was one we actually clicked through to from one of the unit study videos. We watched it at least 20 times and Nadia would say, “NO don’t eat me!”
Very glittery crafts! One for Cynthia with a lot of rhinestones for giving her the shells.
The last photos show her finished lapbook. When we got done she said, “Mom you are really fun to do this with. It’s like a party with you!” And at least 10 times today I heard, “I am so excited for our vacation. I want to find some shells!”
I think these units are really fantastic – I learned a lot or perhaps learned again things from when I was little 🙂 I love that it’s broken down day by day and you can do as little or as much as you want based on the age of your child. The videos and other links being built into the PDF are a huge convenience. We will buy more of these to use in the future.
We have been really busy for the last few weeks so I didn’t worry about packing for our vacation. I planned to help with VBS on Monday and Tuesday, then have all day Wednesday to prepare for the trip. Monday at VBS a couple of my girl friends were SHOCKED that I wasn’t already packed, since I am so organized. But I thought, “Hey, we just came off of the China trip, packing for the beach will be no big deal.” Monday night I did all the laundry in the house and set the girls’ stuff out. Then I thought Tuesday after VBS and naps I could run the errands. Then I would have ALL DAY Wednesday to get the packing done. Piece of cake!
Tuesday we went to VBS and when the girls were home and in bed I started thinking about my packing list. No worries, I have plenty of time. At 3:15 the phone rang. “Hello.” Mike’s Mom: “Louanne, I fell and cut the heck out of my hand!” Me: “What? Do you need to go to the hospital?” Mike’s Mom: “You better talk to them up here.” (Assisted living center director gets on the phone) “Louanne, if you can you better come up here and get her and take her to the hospital. She is going to need sutures. We don’t want to take chances.” Me: “Okay, I am on my way and will be there as soon as I can.”
I pick Linda up and get her over to the emergency room literally around the corner from where she lives and we get signed in. The wonderful staff at the hospital get Linda all taken care of and we are out of there. They tell me what I need to buy for her and when she needs her stitches out. At this point it’s way past her meal time and Linda is diabetic so my next goal is to get some food in her system. I get her back to her little room at the assisted living place and all settled. I tell her I will be back tomorrow with all the bandages and everything else she needs in the morning. I call Mike and tell him I will grab food and head home. At that point it’s almost bedtime for the girls and I think, “No problem. I have all day tomorrow.” I make my packing list, start a little packing pile and get some sleep. The girls and I get up on Wednesday and we are like machines in the morning. We hit 8 places in 2 hours to get everything done. I get the girls some lunch, we play and they head down for naps. Mike gets home from work and we start to pack the car.
Mike tosses the bags with beach chairs into the trunk and a little mouse runs out! It’s just sitting there in the trunk.
Mike takes a quick photo and says that we need to get it out and he is afraid it’s going to go down a hole so he needs to get him quick. Can you guess what happened? The mouse bolted down the hole. So Mike takes everything out of the trunk and removes the liner and pulls out Nadia’s car seat and looks all over the place. No mouse! Mike finally gave up the search and we put the car back together. I was having visions of it eating the electronics of the car!
We head into the house not believing that delay when we were trying to get the car loaded up. Mike goes to rinse something in the sink and turns on the disposal and feels water hit his legs and feet and sees it coming out of the cabinet door. He stops the disposal, opens the cabinet and it’s filled water and shredded Mac n Cheese! WHAT?!? So we have to pull everything out from under the sink – it’s all covered in water and mac and cheese. C-O-V-E-R-E-D! Then Mike tries to figure out what happened. He sees the problem, fixes it and then decides he has to head to Home Depot for a mouse trap and something for the sink. I finish cleaning everything off and get it back under the sink. At this point it’s like a comedy routine around our house. What else can you do but laugh?
We have dinner and I take the girls up for a bath. Get Amelie out and in her jammies and tell her not to try and get back in the tub while I wash Nadia’s hair. I start to soap up Nadia and feel Amelie right behind me and I tell her to stay back because she is always trying to toss stuff in the bathtub when it’s Nadia’s turn. Well she falls over and she starts screaming. “ear moooommmmyyyy!” I grab her and sure enough her ear it scraped and very quickly turning a bright shade of purple. Mike brings up a gel pack and rocks her while I finish with Nadia and all I can think is, “I am ready for this vacation!!”
So now at 10:45 pm the girls are sleeping, the car is packed (complete with mouse traps under the seats…seriously), the clothes for tomorrow are laid out and I am ready for the BEACH!
