milestones

I know I've said it a million times but I seriously can't believe how fast time goes. My little baby is almost six months and it is so much fun to see her little personality coming out more and more. She is such a mover and that is without crawling(which I am not looking forward to). I will lay her on her belly with some toys and just watch her knock her toys around as she tries to grab them and then slowly scoot her way around until she grabs them again.



We have also learned that we can't leave her in the car seat without buckling it because she arches her back and kicks her legs until she scoots to the very edge and I am sure if I let her, she would scoot all the way out.



Her newest development is that she has started sitting. This has been happening for a week or so but the funny thing is that most of the time she really doesn't like it. I will try and sit her up on the floor and help her get her balance but lots of times she will arch her back and put her head back so that she is straight. I've found that if I put a toy in front of her then she will reach for it and play for a minute before she falls over.



I love this next picture because it just shows her curiosity. One day I was cutting out some papers at the counter and I ran downstairs to grab something and when I came back up this is what I saw:



I guess she was just wanting to help but the funny thing is that she kept reaching for the paper for a couple of minutes and I kept worrying that she was going to flip out of the chair. Pretty soon I'm not going to be able to take my eyes off her for fear of what she will be doing next.

Momma's Little Piggy

So Addy has started eating solid foods. We actually started rice cereal a couple weeks ago but I am finally getting around to posting. It was really funny because she had a really hard time swallowing which is normal but really cute because it just got everywhere. These pictures and video were from a few days ago because the ones we took the first time got deleted somehow. She has greatly improved on actually eating the food and I always know when she is done because she just grabs for the spoon to play and spits everything out. It has definitely helped with the sleeping because one day we didn't have much time so I skipped the cereal and man did I regret that because she woke up about three times in the night to eat. I quickly learned that eating cereal=more sleep. Next month I think we may even try oatmeal or something!!

Just a quick update on what is happening at our house thus far. The adjuster came yesterday to survey all the damage which turned out to be quite extensive. I felt like we just came saying, "and then the water went here...and ruined this...and ruined that" pretty much I feel like anywhere that was touched with water was ruined.

(addy loved these blowers)
The great news is that even though it has been sort of a pain to be living in a construction site, we are getting so many things replaced that normally would've cost us a lot more money and time because we would've had to do it ourselves. For example: I have always hated the tile job in our kitchen/dining area because the previous owners did it themselves and did a VERY lousy job. It has been one of the things we were hoping to fix but just never had the money to actually do it. Now with the flood, we get them professionally replaced which is very happy news. Another blessing is that our furnace got ruined. I know crazy to think of living without a furnace in Rexburg for a few days but it actually hasn't been that bad. Anyways it turns out that the furnace we had was the original from when the house was built which was 14 years ago and the live of the furnace was suppose to be about 14-15 years so we would've been lucky to have it last another winter. Now we are getting a new furnace and the insurance is paying for it- major blessing.

(our furnace closet- without the furnace)

Bad news- my carpet in the basement has to be completely replaced and we just bought it a year ago and I really really liked what we had. So we have to go find something else that hopefully we will like just as much.



(goodbye nasty tile)



(this was such a cool machine that they use to dry out the sheetrock)

Where's Noah When You Need Him?

So I thought all of our plumbing problems were history but boy was I wrong. Early this morning, I woke up because I was hearing a strange noise but when I sat up in bed I couldn't hear anything so I layed back down. A while later, approximately 2:00am) Mitch woke up hearing the same thing so we got out of bed to investigate. As we walked down the stairs onto the tile of the main level we knew there was a HUGE problem because our feet were wet and there was literally about two inches of water on the floor.
We raced into the laundry room because that is where we heard the noise and we see water spraying everywhere. Mitch ran downstairs into the bathroom to shut the water off and noticed that it was also covered with water and that the water just kept coming. In the meantime I saw that the water was draining down the heating vents so I grabbed a few buckets and pots and ran downstairs to try and catch the rest that was still draining. Everywhere I looked it seemed I needed another bucket to catch another drip.
Eventually we got as much water mopped up with towels and the draining mostly stopped so I started taking pictures of the damage. The worst of it was in the bathroom and furnace room just below the laundry room so we shut the heat off in order to prevent further damage with a fire. The other two bedrooms had water coming out of the vent so the carpet was wet and I think our printer is ruined because it was right under one of the vents.
Then we went to bed but of course we couldn't sleep. Around 7:00 this morning we called a cleaning and restoration company who came and looked around and then started drying us out. It is amazing the kind of equipment they have to dry stuff out with. Obviously the drywall was soaked but they don't think they will have to replace it because they have a nifty tool to dry it out but they will have to re-tape and texture some areas in the ceiling that had pools of water. And they torn out the carpet pad in the two bedrooms because we got a nice pad last year when we bought the carpet that had a water guard or something like that and so they couldn't suck the water out of it. They still aren't sure about the furnace but they think we may be able to get a new kitchen and dining room floor which would be awesome because we hated the tile job that the previous owners had done but we won't really know until an adjuster comes out to examine the damage.

(these pictures aren't really in order but this is the laundry room once the washer and dryer moved- it is really hard to see the water on the floor but trust me it was there)


(our nice friends at Advanced Cleaning and Restoration trying to dry us out)


(the hose that cracked and water was spraying out of)


(this is the bathroom that got the most water but not necessarily the worst damage)


(one of the bedrooms that we had to use buckets to catch all the water)


(this just shows the seepage and bulging)


(one of the buckets I had under one small drip that I still had to dump a couple of times)


(you can sort of see the water dripping out of this vent but this picture was taken after most of the water had already drained out)


(all of the windows in our house looked like this)


(the kitchen after we had mopped up most of the water)

Overall I am just very grateful that we have home owners insurance and that we are getting a little more money back from our taxes than we originally thought so that will help pay for the deductible. More than anything I am just glad that Mitch and I are able to laugh at these sorts of things even though deep down you just want to cry. I just hope this isn't suppose to be a learning experience for something else in the future because I would hate to know what that is.

The joys of owning a house

It is crazy how much you can learn about something in just a short amount of time. At the beginning of the week our bathtub faucet started dripping and it slowly increased each day so on Wednesday, Mitch decided to replace it. In order to get the new one on, he had to cut a piece of the old pipe off because it was too long. Well in the process of doing this, he loosened the seal in the pipe that goes up to our shower so every time you turned the shower on, water would shoot out of the pipe and end up on our garage floor. Good news is that it was the garage floor and not inside the house, bad news is we didn't find it for a day or so because it was in the garage and so the puddle was more like the size of a small pond.


(the old copper pipe that was shooting water out of it)

Once we found all the water in the garage, we quickly cut a hole in the wall of the bathroom so we could find the leak. It took us awhile because we couldn't see anything leaking but all the insulation and the floor under the tub was soaked so we new something was happening. We turned on the faucet in the tub and nothing happened so we turned the shower on and two seconds later Mitch yells at me to shut it off because water was spraying everywhere.

(the lovely hole in my wall)

Long story a little shorter, Mitch had to find a small blow torch to heat the pipe so we could pull the pieces apart and then put a new elbow something or other back on (you can tell that Mitch learned a lot and I just held the flashlight). I was really nervous about Mitch using the blow torch because he was feeling very powerful when he held it and I was certain that he was going to start the house on fire and then we wouldn't have anything to put it out with because all the water to the house was shut off. It was very stressfull!!



At the end of the day I used our food storage water to boil noodles for spaghetti and my wall is still torn apart and the tun faucet still leaks but hopefully all of that will be fixed by the end of the weekend!!!