Spanish Grandpa and Grandma

My Dad and Mom are the best! They have accepted a call to serve as mission presidents in South America, and are now our designated Spanish Grandpa and Grandma! We are very excited for them and this new adventure they are going on. We had a lot of family get togethers, parties and dinners before they left, but I can't find the pictures I took of any of them (they probably got lost in the comptuter shuffle.)

In preparation for them to leave for three years many of my family members got together to help get their house ready for renters. It was a lot of work but a lot of fun to be around all the people I love! I have posted a few pictures of our efforts.

We had a lot of painting to do and one of the rooms was my brother's with this giant Michigan M on the wall. My sister and I had the great idea of writing "Ohio" over it. The two schools are friends anyway right?

We also had some fun little helpers in the basement for the painting. It only took us 12 hours of scrubbing to get the paint off the floor after! They were sure good helpers though.

This is Kyle performing his chore of cleaning the sink. He did a pretty good job too.

We were detail oriented when it came to cleaning the house. This is me cleaning the back side of the stair banister, grandma volunteered to hold my feet. I am pretty sure she won't do that again!


This is a picture of the bathroom wall before we painted all of it.


This is the picture after it was painted. Pretty huh!

Finally this is a picture of the kitchen after the sink was replaced, the cupboards were washed, the lights were cleaned, the walls were painted, the floor was waxed, the light switches were scrubbed, the banister was polished, and the carpet was cleaned.

Thank you so much to everyone that helped! I am sorry I didn't take more pictures of all the working hands. We recently talked to the renters who are there now and they said they loved it so much we might have to kick them out after three years! Yay...our hard work will hopefully pay off!

Easter

This Easter (I know...it is hard to think back that far) we caught the easter bunny on camera! Well, come to find out he finances all his candy and eggs by mowing lawns...who knew?

Nick thought the bunny was a little sketchy. It was probably the giant carrot that had him concerned.


Nick and Andi had no hesitation when it came to looking for the candy though.

Kyle and Daddy found this sippy cup the Easter Bunny left for him. We still need to work on his sipping technique a little.

Andrea found an easter snow globe that she loved. We all had a great time watching the kids, they sure bring the fun to every event!

Special thanks to the Easter Bunny for humoring us!

Soccer

This year soccer for Andrea was AWESOME! Last year you could tell she got bored as the season went on, but this year we saw a whole new girl. This was especially the case when she realized she could run faster then many of the other kids out there! (she gets that from her dad) Anyway, she scored 5 goals this season with three in one game all from breakaways! Really though she is the best on defence (she gets that from me). This video is taken of her chasing a breakaway from the other team down.

Several times she also had the biggest cheering section of anyone. Really who could do poorly with all these people around!

Grandpa and Kyle enjoying the game!

Go Andi! can't wait for next season!

The Flood

The best word to describe the last 4 months would be CRAZY!!! It all started in the end of march when Mike left on a trip to Arkansas. An hour before he left we realized something was wrong with the computer, it would not boot. But he didn't have enough time to work on it so it was left not working for a week and what ended up to be a couple of months (more on this later). Anyway, the night before we had both noticed the cracks in the basement getting more and more damp. We had been watching the cracks get water spots over the previous several weeks, and our sump pump was going off every 7 seconds. Well, Mike had to leave so he told me to keep him posted. He left Sunday at noon.

At 9:00 that night I checked the basement...We were flooding! I called all my family and they showed up within minutes! At that point I just had a few puddles at the edge of the foundation and coming in some of the cracks. It was coming in very slowly so we had a chance to move all our stuff to the middle of the room on boards. We couldn't do anything to stop it though until the next day so I just got to watch it come in. I slept horribly that night! I kept dreaming there was 5 feet of water in the basement. I did go down once in the middle of the night, it was soooo creepy! It sounded like small crickets everywhere in the basement. As the water seaped in it pushed the air out which made a whistle noise. It was aweful, and all while Mike was gone. The next morning I woke up to water almost everywhere in the basement. At its deepest it was 1 and a half inches.

My mom came the next day to help me move things around. This is the water in our cold storage. It was almost to the top of the board. Nick and Andi thought it was AWESOME! They had always wanted a splash pool in the basement!

Tuesday morning we finally got a plumber in to dig a 2 foot deep hole in the basement and drop in a second sump pump. This is the sump pump and you can see all the water under our foundation. There was a TON of water under our house. We were pumping about 60-70 gallons a minute!

Eventually 5 of the 10 homes in our neighborhood flooded but we got it the worst. The Mayor of Hyde Park even came and marveled at the water feature in front of our house! Anyway we eventually found out our storm drains in our neighborhood are not tied to anything else so the wet spring we had artificially elevated our water table level. Once the 2nd pump was in we were able to keep the water out of our house. Mike finally came back the following Saturday and by then all the water had been cleaned up. Perfect timing on his part!!! Glad that was over too! Thank you to everyone who helped us get through it!