Welcome to the Schap Refugee Camp... please empty your wellies outside the door

Well, it's been a whole business week since I've posted, and what a week it has been! Doubtless you all heard about the flooding up by the Oakdale Dam that occurred this past Tuesday. Sadly, the Schap and Hatke river cottages (four houses apart from each other) were drowned in the flash flood. My family has had our cottage for 19 1/2 years and never had water in the house... and boy, when it finally got in, it got in!!! The saddest part is not the loss of all the stuff or the fact that we might just tear the place down and start over. The saddest part is that no matter what we do with it, it will never have the same cottage smell ever again. No one was staying at our cottage at the time so we don't have any first-hand information about our house; we'll just have to wait until it's safe to go back and we will assess the damage.

At the Schap cottage, however, it was a different story! AnnLaura was here for a few days with Aurelio (13 months old) and she and TusaRebecca were staying up at the cottage. Around 6:00 Tuesday morning, neighbors came around to tell them the river was flooding. They couldn't leave by car because the road goes under water pretty easily, and it was already under. In the end, they had to climb out of a bedroom window into a canoe, paddle through the yard and across the street to a mailbox and hang onto it until someone came to help them. This was all with Aurelio and Baxter too. Eventually the rescue workers got them back to the road and they were brought to my house, where they stayed until last night when AnnLaura's husband got back from Miami and came to pick her up. It sounds bad to say that it was kind of a fun week, but it kind of was. The bummer of it is that almost all of TusaRebecca's belongings were at the cottage so they were all drowned with the house.

For Anja, the week was not so fun. I've known for awhile that Anja is a lot like her daddy, but I didn't realize she would be WORSE. We've created the most anti-social little girl in the world. Christmas was hard on her, but this week she was kind of miserable. She cried a lot and stayed up at night. (So much for the 5-hour sleep streak!) Usually she is most happy in the mornings but even then she wasn't so smiley. Now that everyone's gone though, she's loving the quiet again. She was soooo happy and calm this morning. We are debating the idea of a party after her baptism on Sunday, especially since the baptism is at 5:00 in the evening. That will be going into her crankiest time, and it's always worse when there are lots of people around. So. We'll see.

You're all invited, by the way.

We went shopping yesterday and I was talked into a pair of jeans for $10.99 from Gap. I wasn't sure they'd fit because I am still wearing a few sizes bigger than my normal size.... this is the size between my postpartum size and my regular size. And guess what??? THEY FIT!! PERFECTLY!!!! Talk about a good start to your day!

Theodore is so fat.