The Calm Before the Storm?

After Kevin's family left in March, we knew we only had 4 weeks before the Uda family would be in town. Thus, we tried our very best to keep things together and organized in order to minimize chaos when the Uda's arrived. But as life would have it, the week before my family invaded, FLOODS came to Chicago!

Wednesday night, the 17th of April, it started to rain...and rain... and thunder... and lightning... and RAIN! Although we were awoken several times in the night by the thunder, we really didn't think much else about the storm except that it was a big one.

The next morning Kevin thought maybe he should check our crawl space to see if it had handled the moisture alright. To our surprise, it hadn't! The floor was mostly dry but we could tell by the water marks on our boxes that earlier in the night there had been a lot of water under our house!

If fact, it had accumulated about a foot of water which is unusual for someone who has a sump pump. Then it dawned on us, our power had gone out from the lightning for about 3 hours that night, and in that 3 hours, a whole lot of our storage was destroyed before the water could be sucked back out!

I spent the next few hours removing sopping albums, pictures, journals, Christmas decorations, Hawaiian costumes, and the like from under our house and started feeling a little sorry for myself.

Then Kevin came home from work really early and explained that there was no way to get to his office because it was flooded every where! At that point I realized there were a lot of other people probably doing the same thing I was and that I shouldn't feel that bad for myself. But I still kind of did...

Once Kevin got home, he jumped on board and together we started whipping our basement back into shape. After several hours of trying to dry out our belongings, we were both feeling a little sad. So we decided to take a walk.

Once outside, we realized that there were people only a few houses away from us whose basements were submerged all the way up to their ceilings!  Some people even had flood waters that climbed several feet into their main floor. In fact, we were totally blocked in by people who were flooded in pretty deep. It was like we were somehow at the top of a hill and everyone around us was getting buried by water, but we were remarkably dry!

After our walk, Kevin and I were both feeling very grateful that we only lost a few items and didn't experience the damage our neighbors did. Later on we found out via Facebook that there were many people in our ward who suffered thousands of dollars in damage from the flood, and again, we felt very blessed and grateful. People brought us meals, and fans to dry our basement, and even heaters the next day when the temperatures dropped drastically and we realized our heaters didn't work because they had been submerged in water. So much help was offered within our ward and neighborhood towards us and anyone else who was affected by the flood. It was amazing to feel so much love!

Damage from our friend's home. Pictures taken by Liberty Cameron.

And in the end, we were able to really clean up our storage, minimize it, and store it more efficiently in plastic bins...just on time for the Uda family to arrive! ;)