You always have to pay

When I give advice to "younger" moms one of the things I say a lot is, "Nothing is free. You pay for everything one way or another." For example, if the pre-schooler is exceptionally well behaved one day you can expect that the next won't go quite so well. Another great example would be dehydrating peaches with a one year old and a three year old by yourself.

I was able to get it done in just over an hour's time with no major interruption from the kids. They were downstairs playing well together. At one point in time I could hear a little water running and the two of them giggling. That's not too unusual for them to play in the sink in the bathroom. Caleb slipped and fell and came upstairs crying. He said that there was water on the floor. I asked him to turn off the water and use a towel to clean up the water. He smiled and said, "Okay, mom."

I finished the peaches about 11:00 and the phone rang. I finished my phone call and posted my previous blog post. At 11:20 I went to change the laundry, dress Sarah, check that the water had been dried up and go get Darik because the bus can't get to our house right now due to road construction. That's when I discovered the basement.

I called Jason and asked him to come home because we had a 1/2" of standing water throughout the TV room, the bathroom and the laundry room. Apparently, Sarah and Caleb had brought the garden hose into the house and soaked the floor. Gratefully, they did not hit the bookshelves of videos, the furniture, nor the tv itself, just the floor. We estimate that there was at least 10 gallons of water in the basement. The water flowed from the tv room into the bathroom and then into the laundry room. It did not flow into the playroom that has wall-to-wall carpeting so I'm grateful for that too. Needless to say the pergo isn't going to be the same but what can you do?

I needed Jason to help move the furniture off the rug so that it could be rolled up and removed, full of water, out to the lawn to dry. I'm not big enough to have done that myself and leaving it there until he returned home was not an option. Fortunately, we had been talking about replacing that rug because it has suffered some abuse and is about worn out. This was the last straw, it's done. We won't be replacing it with anything soon because we haven't replaced it yet due to the fact that we can't agree on any pattern of rug we've seen. So, bare floor it is for now. It makes a lot of echoing but that's okay.

I wasn't able to get really good pictures of the crime scene so you'll have to make do with what I was able to capture on "film" and use your imagination for the rest. Hope this brings a smile to someone's face as you think to yourself, "I'm so glad that wasn't me." Don't laugh too hard though, if you have kids, your "payday" will come sometime, I promise. Because NOTHING is free. =)

While vacuuming and mopping and drying the floor all I could do was sing this song by SugarLand, which is why I've attached it to this post. (As a side note to that I got to see them perform this in person at the concert we attended for our Anniversary last month.)

PS - And, as you can imagine, for all that work and effort those are going to be some GREAT peaches.=)