Finally Home!

While our time away was nice and we were extremely appreciative of our family's generosity, we were definitely ready to get life back to normal. We stayed with my grandparents for about 10 days. We had only originally planned to stay 3 days and 2 nights so we washed alot of clothes while we were there. Maggie had a fenced in backyard with lots of squirrels and birds to chase. My Nanny babied her BIG TIME by defrosting steaks and ground meat for her, feeding her ham bones and ham and cheese hot pockets. Maggie even felt comfortable enough to crawl into bed with my grandparents. Nanny enjoyed having me there to cook new things with her. Papa even having E around so they could talk politics and tinker on the computers.

We got home on Friday afternoon after lunch. After several days, we finally had sewage and power so we knew that clean water wouldn't be far behind. Sure enough we got clean water on Sunday so all is back to normal, at least for us!! We checked the house and everything was fine. We do have a large tree branch on our fence but E should be able to fix that by replacing 2 of the slats on the fence. But OH MY debri was everywhere. Since I really didn't have maternity work clothes lying around the house, E gave me the OK to stay inside all day get things done in there. I felt guilty about not helping but once he told me he wanted me to stay inside, that made everything better.

Driving into town was very erie. It was still somewhat baron and lots of businesses were still closed. Lots of trees down, giant piles of debri in front of everyones home, blue tarps on every other roof, traffic lights out and homes still boarded up. Very weird!! Here's a few crappy pictures of what we saw on the way into town.

One of our neighbors a few streets over...we saw several houses like this or worse.

This is our street

Our house...with just a few branches down

The Backyard (The only damage we suffered was this limb on our back fence.)

E spent all day Saturday bonding with his new chain saw and using the car and several ropes to drag large branches from the backyard to the front yard. He worked incredibly hard all day. And then had to come inside do homework all night. I felt really bad for him. And just when we thought we came out on the other side unscathed, the kitchen sink started leaking. Well, to be accurate, it looks like it has been leaking since long before we bought the house. E went to make himself a pot of coffee to stay up all night and do homework when he heard the water dripping into the cabinet underneath the sink! So he spent all day Sunday with a major headache, stuck up under the sink completely redoing all of the plumbing under there. It's still not finished. It looks like I won't be cooking for a week or so until he can get a chance to pull the cabinet out, fix the leak and replace the subfloor. Sigh! With all of the homework he has with this last class he is taking and all of the debri left everywhere, time is something he doesn't have alot of. So for the next few days, I am using all paper and plastic ware and ordering out unless I want to wash dishes in the bathroom sink.