We're in the big league now!

Our first official trip to the ER for Tyson....



What it looked like after he smacked it on the corner of the chair. It was pretty wide and deep. Obviously we were able to stop the bleeding, but still thought stitches would help it heal and keep it from dragging his eyebrow down as it grew.

So, we went to the Urgent Care Clinic, only to find out that they don't do lacerations for kids under 4 years old. So we were sent to the ER. Fortunately it wasn't busy, but Tyson sure didn't like it. It was pretty funny though, at one point while he was screaming/crying and the doctor was getting the needle and thread ready to stitch him he stopped yelling and looked over and said, "Whazzat?" Then he proceeded to yell and cry some more.





With 3 big boy stitches. They never seemed to bother him.




One week later with the stitches out. Looks pretty good! Well, aside from the breakfast on his face. :O)

The last weekend..

The last weekend was definitely the highlight of the month for us. As a family we drove to Seattle then dropped Tyson off with Grandma Patrick. Jason and I continued on to Snoqualmie Pass to stay at the cabin of some good friends. To get to the cabin in the winter requires snowshoeing (or cross country skiing) in about 1.5 miles. It was a relaxing weekend for us, no schedule to keep, though we found ourselves going to bed early and waking up around normal Tyson time...but it was nice to relax and read, hike a little and sit in front of the wood stove fire. :O) Jada had a blast being a snow dog, she had such a great time bounding through the snow that she was limping for a few days after...

We did a short hike to the nearby lake on Saturday.

Crossing the bridge. As you can see -- the snow level is a few feet above the handrails!

What a cozy cabin! Thanks Hamiltons for letting us use it!

Tyson had a good time with his Grandma. He was smitten with all the cars that my brother and I used to play with as a kid. She had kept them for just a moment like this! :O) Thanks mom for watching him!

When we first got into town we were able to swing by Everett and visit Carmen and Jonathan, who had just welcomed Baby Bethany Ruth to their family!! Carmen doesn't yet have a blog to show off her pictures...we'll keep asking her to start one though. :O)

what's new here...

With all of the exciting flood stuff going on we haven't kept up on what Tyson is doing these days. He is growing and changing so much we are learning something new from him each day! Last week we (well, mostly Tenisha) had a little scare with him. On Friday while Jason was at work (with our one car) Tyson managed to push himself away from the table so abruptly it caused his chair to tip over backwards. His head hit the floor and the chair broke from the force of the landing. He was pretty chill for awhile and when he started walking again was a little tipsy. I called his dr. office and the RN recommended that he come in for a check up. He didn't have any bumps or bruises, but since he was unsteady I wanted to take him in. Fortunately one of Jason's co-workers, a friend that he went through academy with, lives not even 5 min away, works a different shift (so was home) and has a daughter a month or so younger than Tyson (which means a carseat his size). He was able to take us to our appt (20 min away) which was such a great help. The bus would have been 1.5 hrs each way. By his appt he was doing much better, though a little out of sorts, like maybe he had a headache, and the doctor said if anything worse was going to happen we'd probably see it by the time he went to bed. Well, of course, later that evening while he was throwing legos at the fridge for target practice he did a little happy dance, slipped, the lego in his hand dropped on the floor and he firmly planted his face on it. It looked like he landed on his nose, but then I noticed the blood on my shirt and the huge cut swelling on his upper lip. For real. My first thought was that we were going to have to go back and get stitches. It turned out it was just a cut....but really, why does it all happen in one day? He recovered quickly and still puts his feet up and pushes against the table while he's eating, though now his chair is against the wall so it shouldn't be able to fall again. Oh Tyson.

The other big change that happened this week is that Tyson now sleeps in a toddler bed!!! He made the transition pretty quick once we put on his new Lightning McQueen bedding! We had tried with just the sheets and blankets he used in the crib and it wasn't appealing. Since we changed his sheets though, he wants to sleep there and has done so for nap and bedtime for the last three days!! He doesn't even climb out of bed in the morning until we open his door! It's pretty sweet. We were thinking it would take a lot longer since many kids books say they aren't really ready until age 2.

He sure is talking a lot more and learning more words and phrases. His new phrase is 'let's see' which he says more like 'lesthseee'.

Reading aloud to himself while mama is making lots of phone calls and papa is working on floodstuff..

Drying Out - Post Flood Update

Well, we are almost 3 weeks past our Riverboat event. We finished the last of the demolishing during the first week. We tore up all of the finished flooring plus the particle board underlayment. We took out the bottom 2 feet of sheet rock and insulation. Now all the framing wood is exposed and drying out nicely. We suspect we will be able to begin building again in 3-4 weeks. Of course, it will be a slow process as we can only build as we have money to buy the supplies. Luckily, many of Jason's co-workers have offered to lend a hand. And some of them have prior experience in drywalling and building houses.

The car was a total loss, as we suspected. So, Jason's Honda (which he has had since January 2000) is forever gone. All-State is giving us a little over $1700 for it. We were hoping for at least $2000, but apparently 220K miles is a lot. :) No amount can replace the reliability and gas efficiency that that car gave us. It will be hard to replace her. Especially with 1700.

In the wake of our mini disaster, we are a little excited to remodel the downstairs the way WE want it. We had planned on replacing the floors and remodeling the bathroom anyway. Not all at once, but hey we gotta make lemonade out of these lemons. :) We are excited to attend the Home and Garden Show next month and a Remodeling Show next week. Plus, our local Home Depot has some classes on drywalling and flooring coming up. So, we should get some ideas and pointers for our 'project'.

All in all, we are doing alright. Of all the people that have had flooding in their homes in the past couple weeks, we have been pretty fortunate. The water was only in our home for a few hours before it receded. We were not flooded with sewage as some of our neighbors were. We did not lose any possessions, as we had most of our stuff upstairs. (Plus the washer and dryer still work. Yay! And we were able to get our framing wood exposed early, so we don't have a mold or mildew problem.

Granted, when it's all said and done, we will have spent a few thousand dollars to get back to where we were. (Maybe the city will reimburse some of it, since they failed to unclog the culvert.) We are just thankful that no one was hurt and that we have a secure income and friends that are builders to help us get the downstairs back to normal.

I think we see a silver lining...it's pretty faint still...

Friday night Tenisha's mom came down to play with Tyson so we could work together on demolition downstairs. Jason did a lot of tearing up of carpet, padding and linoleum yesterday by himself while Tenisha had the job of playing with Tyson and making important phone calls. One of those calls was to the insurance company. Of course we don't have flood insurance, we're not in a flood zone!!! Our car, the Honda, was a bit soggy. There was standing water in it. The outside flood line was a bit higher than what came in the house and it was too high to move the car once we realized how high it was actually getting...so in talking with the insurance we figured out the engine had been submerged (wouldn't start) and we are covered for flood damage!!! yay! We have to wait til next week to talk with the adjuster...we're sort of preparing for it to be a total loss, we'll see..It will be sad to see her go, when we are on road trips we get 32-34 mpg. Is there any other car that comes close to that for $2,000? Doubt it.

Today we tore up the 'snap together laminate', which we were told by a couple of people (flood specialist and Home Depot flooring specialist) that it probably wouldn't be salvagable. Well, we started unsnaping it and lo and behold it was laid on plastic on top of the concrete, just snapped together and a little wet. The backing of it was waterproof, not like the felt we saw at the store! We took it apart, wiped it down and set it out to dry. A few hours later it was dry and looking great!! We probably saved at least 90% of it. Hopefully that room will go back together really easily.

Then...our neighbor had a ton of family over helping them clear out their basement (they've lived here 30 years!!!) and asked to take our load to the dump for us and didn't want us to even pay the dump fee! That was such a surprise as we were talking about how we were going to do that. All of the flooring we had removed at that point fit into one pickup and he was more than willing to do it! What a blessing!!

We found out from the same neighbor the rest of the water story. As the water was rising we and they called about it and let the city know there was a problem. A person came by to check it out and said the culvert wasn't blocked it was just too much water to handle. This visit happened before the water was in our houses. Apparently at 4:00 am they came back and CLEARED a BLOCKAGE in the culvert and by 6:00 am when we got up all the water was gone. So apparently this was preventable. Our neighbors were sure it was a blockage as it happened 3 years ago but it was taken care of right away and didn't get nearly this bad. A little water in the park was all. So our houses plus a few more at the other end of the creek were the unlucky receipients of a flood. Should the city be responsible for this? We're wondering...

Well that's all I can think of for now..we have a dehumidifier downstairs chugging away...makes it dehydrating working down there but it sure is drying everything up nicely. We will talk to a flood repair service on Monday to get an idea of what all needs to be done.

We'll keep you posted! :O)

post flood update

well..when we woke up this morning at 6:00 (Jason called into work...emergency day!) the floods had receded. The basement is now empty...except for soggy carpet and a nice debris line about 6 inches up. We figured out the oven breaker switch problem. It's the one marked 'dryer'. Huh.. should we have guessed that? We were trying to keep that one off seeing that the dryer was sitting in a deep pool of water. So today will be cleaning, pulling up carpet, removing baseboards and letting the washer and dryer dry out to see if they are salvagable. If you were to drive down our street today the sun is shining, there's a half inch of snow on the ground and barely any water in the road. The creek is full, but doesn't look so vicious as it did last night flowing through our house. Crazy.

Rain, rain go away....seriously!

Well, I had honestly started a blog earlier today and we were working on picking out which pictures to use. We've been wonderfully busy the past month and have been documenting it, just not downloading the photos and blogging about it.

BUT......that blog is on hold now and we have an update...

The rain that has fallen for the past day finally turned to snow at 1:00am or so...I guess it's officially Jan 2 as I write this. And yes, we were still awake to see that transition. All day we've been watching the creek in the park get higher and wider and thought that at the most we might have a soggy backyard. We popped in a movie at 7:45 with all of the water still on the other side of the fence. When the movie was over at 9:45 we went to let Jada out for a night time potty break. There was what looked to be a lake in our backyard. Further investigation down the staircase revealed the water was up to the bottom step (about 4 inches high) and there was a river flowing along the side of the house!!!!

Jason opened the side gate to release the flow, the street in the front was already filling up. We also noticed a trickle of water coming in the side door. A visit from the neighbors helped as they knew what number to call to complain about the creek's culvert being stopped up. To make a very long story short....It is 2:45am and the entire basement is now covered in 4-5 inches of water. It covers the bottom step of our inside staircase. We spent a few hours moving everything (furniture included) upstairs. Once it started it went really fast. The street finally spilled over into the front yard...it's now completely underwater as well. Our cars have water over halfway up the tires. From our porch when you look to the left it looks like a river running into the ocean. Trucks attempting to drive by end up with water over the hood of the truck!

Amazingly Tyson has slept through this whole thing!! And so far we still have power and hot water. Jason turned off the power to downstairs and in trying to figure out the breakers hit one for the kitchen and now the stove won't turn back on even though every thing else is on. Hmmm...we've even double checked and flipped and nothing....grrr... but for now we are doing fine...just a little frustrated at the prospect of all of the water damage downstairs. The washer and dryer are sitting in water right now...

Ah well. It's all just stuff. We're safe and warm for the time being. We've had record snowfall and record flooding (we live at 436 ft above sealevel! They deemed us 'not in a flood plain' for insurance....Ha!). What other adventures are in store for us here? :O)

We're gonna watch the snow for a few more minutes, then head to bed. Ty will be making his appearance around 7:00 or so. Maybe this morning will be one of those God given mornings where he sleeps in till 8 or 8:30...It happened last week!

Night Night.