Well, what fun! NOT!

So our fine tale begins on Thursday, when the hurricane hit. Well, I guess technically it was not a hurricane, but there were sustained winds of over 70mph, torrential rains, storms, and tornado warnings specifically mentioning Flossmoor. The boys and I hid in the basement bathroom, which is a spooky place on a nice day (we haven't gotten around to fixing it up) and really not pleasant with the power off and 2 scared boys. We had the dim light of one flashlight with failing batteries, and his Leapfrog drum ("play the drum, everyone, play the drum") which lights a little.

Stupid me forgot to charge my cellphone, so it was running out of battery too, but I kept checking it to see if the storms had passed enough to emerge. Once they did, we got out of there, went to my folks who had power, and then met Steve for dinner at Chilis. Not bad, eh?

Then we went home just in time to face another bad storm, and we were still without power. Andrew was now becoming panicked. So we made the decision to stay the night at a local hotel. After the storm let up enough to emerge from the basement, we packed up (not as easy with two kids) and headed out. Roads were flooded so we had to go long out of our way to get to the hotel, but did and got checked in around 9 (Ryan was back awake after falling asleep in the car, and Andrew was so excited to be there and that they had power!)

Honestly, not a bad night in the hotel. Andrew was out within 5 minutes of laying down, and Ryan went down pretty quickly too, and was only up a couple of times.

In the morning, we had breakfast and Steve ran off to his meeting and we went home. We had power -- hooray! I decided to run downstairs to see if we had gotten any water in the basement fireplace, as we sometimes do. So I bound down the stairs - thump, thump, thump, thump, SPLASH. Our basement is underwater. Explitaves spew from my mouth.

For those of you who don't know, we finished our basement 2.5 years ago.

So, I went to my preschool meeting, then came home and started throwing things away. Steve did the same. We lost quite a bit, but not much that meant anything. We'll just call it a "natural pruning event" much like the cicadas were to the trees. The biggest PIA is the carpet. We finally got a disaster crew over to tear it out on Sunday night.

Of course, during all this, Ryan got sick -- some intestinal virus thing. Fever, diarreha, crabbiness, and finally a full body rash. Oh so fun. Top all of this off with it being CRAZY busy for me, with school stuff, Andrew's upcoming party, etc and you've got a stressed out mama.

I jokingly call it the Zoloft Challenge Week. As I only had one panic attack, that's pretty good.