Thankfulness-Inducing Bad Events

So, my last blog entry was all happy and smiles, but we did have a couple of……events…..occur right around Thanksgiving, that made me REALLY appreciate my family's blessings.

THANKFULNESS-INDUCING EVENT NUMBER ONE.

You remember our fun Thanksgiving Annual Ritchie Family Retreat Getaway (or whatever the heck I called it) to the Roxbury, right?  Well, what I didn't mention was that when we returned home, our basement had flooded.  Flooded a LOT.

Our sump pump on/off switch was broken in that once it was on, it never turned off!  And we hadn't gotten around to replacing the sump pump yet.  So, at the time, we had it turned off, BUT forgot to turn it back on before we went on our trip.  And, of course, it rained.  Hence, FLOOD.  Three inches of standing water everywhere, all over.   So, our Thanksgiving evening was spent sloshing around the basement and up and down the stairs moving things into the garage to start the cleaning and drying process.  However - and here's the weird part - Our family retreat must have done me an AMAZING amount of good because not ONCE was I irritated about any of this, NOR was I irritated at Mark for forgetting to turn the sump pump on, which would have prevented all of this.  REPEAT, I did NOT get irritated (well, irritated is too gentle of a word, normally I would have been raging furious), but I did NOT.  I still can't figure that out.  I should add that Mark is probably extremely thankful for THAT.

Anyway, I am…

• Thankful that with three prior basement floods in the past 9 years, we were (mostly) prepared, with everything off the floor or in plastic bins, and we keep virtually no wood items/products in our basement anymore at all.

• Thankful that I still have intuition/the Spirit working within me - for about a month before this happened, I kept thinking (at least once a day) that I needed to get those recently-put-in-the-basement cardboard boxes of old family photos OFF of the basement floor and into a plastic bin.  I did NOT do this, so one box of photos is pretty much ruined, but I'm still grateful that I was warned (by SOMETHING) and I have no one to blame but my lazy bum self.

• Kinda thankful that one less box of family photos means less scrapbooking and work later.  Is that bad??

• Thankful for our dehumidifier (purchased after a previous flood) that works amazingly well and is keeping it from getting too stinky and moldy down there!

 (I know, I know, but I needed a photo of SOMETHING up here. 
All hail to the dehumidifier!)

• Thankful that in the process of moving stuff up out of the basement and into the garage so we could clean, that we decided half of the stuff we could get rid of and give away.  Yay!  More simplification is always good.

• Thankful to get rid of more towels - our upstairs linen closet is overflowing and I've been meaning to clean out the towels and give them away to a pet shelter, BUT our kitchen was a sloppy mess from our wet and muddy books and it was sooo nice to be able to use a few old towels, clean up the crud, and then toss 'em.  MORE simplification.  Yup, still always good.

• THANKFUL that our basement floor is sooooooo clean!  I still can't believe how clean it looks.  We'd been meaning to clean up down there so we could put together our kids' winter playground (basketball, hockey, tricycle and scooter racing), but hadn't yet, so the flood kicked our tushies into gear and the basement is much cleaner that it would have been had there been NO flood.  Weird how things work sometimes.

• And finally, thankful that, for whatever strange reason, our sump pump has mysteriously begun to work again and we do NOT have to replace it just yet.  Woohoo!  I know that replacing a sump pump is, for most people, not a big deal, but for my woefully-impractical and woefully-unhandy husband (though brilliant) even changing a light bulb can become a big deal.  I love you, Markli, but well, you know it's true.

THANKFULNESS-INDUCING EVENT NUMBER TWO.

Fast forward about 5 days AFTER the flood from which we were finally recovering, around 11:00pm our downstairs carbon monoxide detector alarmed.  HOLY CRAPPIE!  I am terrified of carbon monoxide gas, terrified that something so invisible is so deadly.  I mean, dying by C02 poisoning certainly beats dying by shark attack (a great fear of mine. because I'm in the ocean so much, ya know), but anyway.  We've had CO2 detectors as long as we've had houses and I test and replace them religiously.  Anyway, Mark and I flurried around (we were still awake watching TV and catching up on Terra Nova and Castle) immediately finding owners manuals, opening windows, checking on kids.  We weren't sure what to do, 911 seemed too extreme and we couldn't call a furnace repair guy until the morning.  Mark thought we should just open windows and wait until morning.  But I KNEW that even with every window open I would NOT get a wink of sleep that night, worrying obsessively about my kids (and about Mark, too, a little).  So, we woke up all the kidlets and went to a hotel, everyone in their pajamas (including me).

My three kids were AMAZING.  Of course, it probably helped that we were going to a hotel with a swimming pool.  Because everyone with kids probably knows that the MOST FUN thing in life to do is going to a hotel to swim in the indoor pool and watch TV in bed, right?  It was another vacation for them, two in one week!  Woot woot!  We kept them home from school the following day, letting them swim for 2 hours in the morning and then going to a family breakfast at Dennys.  And THEN, because Connor and Noah were sooooo good at the hotel, I took them to Target and let them pick out new Wii games to play - since they had the day off from school, we turned it into a full-out kid goof-off day!

Anyway, I am…

• Thankful that Mark was NOT in Africa.  He'd been planning to go the previous Friday (day after Thanksgiving) but delayed until the following Wednesday.  Usually all of the BAD stuff happens when he goes to Africa (I KID YOU NOT - record breaking snowstorms, air conditioner breaking, Shelby breaking her wrist, the furnace going out, our first super-bad basement flood - ALL when Mark was conveniently ON ANOTHER CONTINENT!), so having him around to help me deal with this latest little….adventure….was, as American Express says so eloquently, PRICELESS.

• Thankful for CO2 detectors.

• Thankful that we live in such a safe neighborhood that we could leave every window open and not lose one second of sleep worrying about intruders or burglars.

• Thankful that our pets were healthy and safe. 

• Thankful that the weather was unusually mild enough that if the CO2 gas didn't get our pets, the usual freezing cold would have!, especially our poor little tropical lovebirds.

• Thankful that we had enough money to be able to flee to a nearby hotel immediately and not have to worry about it impacting our budget too badly.  

• Thankful that the hotel night manager took pity on our little temporarily homeless family and upgraded us to a nice suite, free of charge.

• Thankful that our swimming lessons bag is always packed and ready to go and it was easy to toss in the car quickly.

• Thankful that Connor and Noah were soooooooooo amazing with Shelby in the pool (since Mark and I's swimsuits were NOT in our swimming lessons bag), each taking turns carrying her around. I love Shelby's little swimsuit wedgie here in this first photo.  Hee hee!

• Thankful for Connor and Noah's amazing water dancing skills.  But yeah, Connor, keep up your plans to become a quantum physicist, okay?  And Noah, even driving a garbage truck (Noah's current life ambition) will pay better than water dancing.  Mmmkay?

• Thankful for Dennys.  Kind of.  Why do kids like Dennys so much???  Eww.

• Thankful for good friends (Gerri, Patricia, Angie, Tammy, Deutschmans) who offered their help to us upon finding out about our predicament (since I whined about it on Facebook).

• Thankful for an efficient local Fire Department who arrived the next morning within mere minutes of our phone call.  Sure, two fire trucks and a squad car, meaning 10 huge fire-uniformed men tromping around in my house, was probably overkill.  But they took it absolutely seriously and even chided us for NOT calling them the previous night!  As they pointed out, "We're open 24 hours, you know!"

• Thankful that it was just a faulty C02 detector (it went off exactly in the pattern of a real CO2 leak and NOT the pattern of an error, which is why I basically freaked out) and NOT a faulty furnace!  I don't even want to know how much replacing a furnace would cost, especially at Christmastime.

• Thankful that I now know how to light the pilot light on our water heater (since the Fire Dept forgot to re-light it and I didn't know it was out until after Mark was gone to Africa) and it was easy.  I need to learn more life skills like this!

• Thankful that Connor is seemingly over his autism stage of going into full-alert meltdown with any sudden change to his schedule and/or life.

• Thankful that Shelby and Noah are so easy-going and up for anything at any time!  :)

Thankful that we're all (including our pet family members)
alive and healthy and happy and BLESSED.

(even though we take horrible Christmas family photos)