Monday, Monday

I realize that tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I should probably post something sentimental about family and thankfulness. But that's not going to happen here today.

I had an awesome weekend this past weekend. Girls night, vampire ridiculousness, parades, lots of time spend doing nothing, church, birthday parties, and turkey bowling. People love weekends and dread Monday mornings for a reason.

And last morning was about to remind me of this. My Monday started at the unwelcome hour of 5:30am, when Dane burst into our room to tell us that their upstairs toilet was overflowing. I kicked Brandon in the shins, and groggily muttered to him to bring a couple of towels with him to investigate the early morning bathroom mishap. Because clearly I had no intention of getting out of bed.

About thirty seconds later, Brandon was wide awake, hollering at me that this was beyond a two-towel clean up, and I was going to have to get up and help with the unfortunate toilet situation.

And the situation? Well. The upstairs potty was a-overflowin’, and it got a little too ambitious to contain its’ destructiveness to just the bathroom. The water had seeped into the boys’ adjacent bedroom, soaking their closet floor and half of their bedroom floor. But heaven forbid it stop there. The water had soaked through the upstairs floor, and was poring through sections of the living room ceiling just below. I walked downstairs to find the entryway and half of our living room underwater. I’m not going to lie, I had some Ike flashbacks when I saw the water coming through the living room light fixture.

I did what everyone does when their house is flooding from the inside out at 5:30 in the morning: I folded laundry and started packing our suitcases for our Thanksgiving trip. Again, my thoughts flashed back to the time period immediately post-Ike destruction, when I stood in the pantry and debated what dry goods to throw out, as a hurricane raged outside and water flooded my bedroom and kitchen. My brain sometimes copes with stress by focusing on mundane, unimportant activities.

I did have enough sense to call our insurance company (who hates us by now), and by 10am a company was at our house ripping the floor out of the living room and measuring moisture levels throughout our house.

In other words, how everyone wants to spent Thanksgiving week. I had the unenviable task of keeping all four kids upstairs for most of the day while the crew worked downstairs, and when I started seeing the dozens of giant fans and dehumidifiers that were to be set up throughout the house for the better part of this week, I decided that perhaps our insurance company would be interested in sponsoring a hotel stay for a couple of days. I had images of Harper surfing down the stairs atop a giant dehumidifier. We packed up a couple of bags, and headed to our home-away-from-home: a 2 bedroom suite with full kitchen and THREE television sets. And an indoor pool. Three television sets. We have one functioning TV at our house, so we were all a little excited about all of the holiday week TV watching options. I thought for a few minutes that I was being a little whiny about staying in a hotel while our house was still livable, then we stopped by this morning for a couple of things, and this is what I saw:

Yeah. No, that would not have worked at all. And it sounds like a wind tunnel. An 88 degree wind tunnel.

Speaking of 88 degrees, Happy Thanksgiving from Texas, y'all.