Recent Pics

I've had oodles of recent pics collecting on my phone and decided to share them all at once ... sorry that some are a bit blurry, but they capture moments I want to make sure we remember.

In no particular order ...

Snuggling with Piper after a day in the garden

V loved snuggling with Uncle Adam the afternoon this was taken

The pups enjoying their summer evening ... likely watching for a chipmunk!

Picking flowers

"Working" at Mommy's office

Having a tea party with Grandpa on the kitchen floor

Hannah "helping" me organize the pantry

V had to have the laundry basket over both our heads together

 This picture is too perfect for words

All the girls taking a break after a hard morning's work

Uncle Adam helped her build this tower using every.single.last.block!

And finally ... a couple videos to share. In this first one you won't *see* much as I turned my phone on while I was driving. But you can hear V chattering, as she normally does, in the back seat. On this particular drive, the word of choice was "uh oh."

This final one shows her mad skills with a fork.

Flood

Tuesday afternoon, it started raining.  Tuesday night, it poured.  We watched as thunderstorm after thunderstorm rolled across the weather maps ... and across our property.

We've had periods with strong storms roll through before, and even a couple rain storms where the end of our road was under water. And as we all know, the National Weather Service issues flash flood warnings ALL.THE.TIME. 

Usually when I hear flash flood warning, I just figure I shouldn't camp next to a river, and I'll be ok.

So we went to bed on Tuesday night as normal, with the biggest worry in our heads being our basement. With the leaking we've had so far this year, would we wake up to water in the basement bathroom again?

I was woken at 4:00 am by the weather radio going off. I didn't bother to check it. (Ho, hum.) But as I laid in bed I realized I needed to go to the bathroom. And after the bathroom, realized I was hungry. And by then, I was wide awake and decided to just hang out for awhile with the pups.

The first thing I noticed was a text from my brother, who was working the night shift as a cop in Cloquet. It said, "I hope this doesn't wake you but I want you and V to be safe. Freeway is closed in Duluth due to flooding. St Louis River has risen 3 ft. Check before leaving for work." As I texted him, and read all the facebook posts from everyone else who was up at four in the morning, I began to realize the extent of the damage. People were talking about several feet of water in basements, whole neighborhoods and towns being evacuated, water escaping from dams, animals escaping from the zoo ... a polar bear running around West Duluth? (ok, so it just escaped its enclosure and never left the zoo. A seal, however, was found on nearby Grand Avenue). Clearly, this was beyond what anyone had experienced or expected out of this storm.

At 6:00 my co-worker Steven texted me to say City Hall was closed. With no internet at home, Matt was also unable to work. When I woke up to get Victoria, I glanced out her window and was shocked to see our river ... just down the trail ... over halfway to our house! It had climbed, what ... 75? more? feet closer to our house.

  

See the glimmer of water between the trees? Normally you can't see this

from the house. 

We spent the morning monitoring facebook, email, and web sites via our phones (thank god for smart phones!). We were essentially stranded at our house. Here are some pictures I took off various facebook posts that show some of the damage around the area. My apologies to the photographers for not tracking photo credits. On my mobile app I wasn't able to "share" photos like I wanted. My main reason for putting them here on the blog is to show our out-of-town family and friends what this was like, and to save it to some day show our kids what happened.

We normally buy our bird seed from this store. Guess now we'll have to go by boat? This is

up by the mall. As planners, we always caution people about building in flood

plains. This is why. This, as well as many surrounding businesses and residents,

are located in the Miller Creek flood plain.

A sinkhole along Skyline Parkway

Someone kayaking along a street by UMD.

 

My friend Terry took this picture of Vermilion Street in Duluth.

Allendale Motel, West Duluth

 This had been a small stream in a pipe under the Whole Foods Co-op Parking Lot.

It completely washed away their retaining wall and part of the parking lot ...

not to mention damage to nearby houses.

Grandma's Restaurant, by the mall

Downtown Proctor

Personally, the hardest for me was the zoo and Jay Cooke. The zoo lost several animals to flooding, which made me want to cry. Jay Cooke State Park lost its landmark swinging bridge. I couldn't even count the number of times I've crossed that bridge, which normally is about 40 feet above the water.

The swinging bridge being swept away

On the way to Jay Cooke, we have always crossed the Thomson Bridge, an old truss bridge that crosses the St. Louis River near a dam. Since I was a kid, I've been parking by the bridge to watch high water levels in the spring, or kayak races, or simply to walk along the rocks. No matter how much flooding we'd had, that bridge has always been there. Then I saw this posted on facebook and again wanted to cry:

I felt slightly better when my brother told me that had plans to replace this bridge anyway, but it saddens me that truss bridges are no longer being built. I love those old structures.

A couple other sources of photos from around the region:

• Minnesota Public Radio article
• City Pages blog

Thankfully, we were quite lucky overall. The river had gotten higher near our house, surrounding roads were covered by water -- but even our leaky basement stayed dry!

Here is a picture of the end of our road:

On the bright side, Victoria finally got to put her rain boots to good use. She thought the water was awesome! 

When we drove down to check out the road, we also got to meet all our neighbors in one fell swoop. Over two years of living here, and there were four families along our road we had never met ... now we have!

The strangest thing about the water here is that the water didn't seem to be moving fast, but it sounded like we were near a roaring waterfall. After the end of the road dried out a little, Matt took the four wheeler out to investigate, and saw that the brand new road the County built last year had these awesome little rock formations ... the noise we heard was the water rushing over these road sections:

The below picture is taken from an area of road that remains closed even several days later. It is Maple Grove Road at the intersection with Hwy 33. The photo can be misleading, but to show how high the water is ... look on the left hand side of the road for a mailbox. It looks like it is resting right on top of the water, making this stretch of road covered with about 3 feet of water.

Victoria seems to find the bright side of everything. While outside, she stopped to smell the flowers ...

And inside, she livened up our day by being as goofy as she could. Putting a lego box on your head and then peeking under it to see if Mommy and Daddy are looking is a sure way to get them to laugh ...

The following day, it was a challenge to get to work. So many roads were closed, so many bridges out. But by Friday, most of the roads were open, at least in our neck of the woods. The river is nearly back within its banks. People are volunteering to clean up Duluth's parks and neighborhoods, and slowly people are being allowed back into the evacuated areas. It has been heartening to see the fast response from leaders and citizens. Through it all, we had a dry house and electricity, and we consider ourselves very fortunate.

Big News

This hasn't been on the blog yet. We told our immediate families a couple weeks ago, and made it facebook-official right after that. Actually, Victoria made the announcement in the best way she could:

Victoria seemed really proud of her new shirt, even though she is in for a big surprise in about 7 months!

(Hannah and Piper didn't get new shirts. They too are in for a big surprise, although they have proven resilient with the first child. We are so lucky to have such wonderful girls.)

I had an ultrasound almost right after we found out. There wasn't much to see at the time ... a little sac with a tiny white dot in the right hand side of it:

Baby is due at the end of January. I am already in the super-nauseous, super-tired phase where I continually ask myself why we women choose to do this to ourselves. Then I look at Victoria and remember why. All we can hope for is that this pregnancy goes as smoothly, and that we again have a healthy and happy little one!

Children's Museum

My friend Amy has Tuesdays and Thursdays off, and we had talked about doing a couple summer activities with our girls. Last week seemed the perfect time to take a day off; Matt was out of town, so if I used a vacation day I could not only spend time with Victoria but could also relieve our pups of a long day in the kennels.

With our luck, the day dawned dark, dreary, gloomy, and pouring rain. All thoughts of the zoo or pool left our minds, and we instead decided to spend the day inside at the Children’s Museum.

The museum just moved to a new location – an interim space until they build inside their new building. They haven’t even officially opened yet, so the exhibits are a bit sparse, but the ones they have are educational and fun. V especially loved climbing the steps on a mini bridge; sending golf balls down a create-your-own-track system, and this butterfly imaging thing where “butterflies” would land on your shadow if you stood still.

She had so much fun that when we decided to leave, she refused to put on her jacket or hat (two things she normally loves). When we got out to the parking lot, she ditched me the first chance she got and started running as fast as she could back to the entrance! ... A sure sign of a successful day off.

(The puppies were also happy. After just a few hours in their kennels they got to snuggle with mom for a long afternoon nap, then we all went outside and ran around and played.)

Tenley "jumping" with her mom

At the archeology exhibit ... she would have loved to play in the dirt

Serving herself a "meal" in the "Great Hall" of the castle

Here's a short video of V building with the castle bricks:

Weekend in the Cities

I had been really wanting some time in the Cities to catch up with old friends.

As it happened, we had a grad party coming up that provided the perfect "excuse" to spend a whole weekend. After all, we were already spending the money on gas ... what was another $100 or so on a hotel room? (or, at least, that's what I explained to Matt ;) ).

We woke up early on Saturday morning, dropped the dogs off at my parents, stopped at Wal-Mart to pick up a couple things, and then were ready to hit the road. Well, not quite. We realized we had forgotten to pack sippy cups, so back into Wal-Mart I went to buy new ones. For awhile I was afraid we'd never get out of the Wal-Mart parking lot.

An uneventful ride to the Cities was followed by ... a stop at WestPhoto for Matt (who was thrilled to buy a new lens), lunch at McDonald's (for Matt), dropping Matt off to meet his boss at a coffee shop to work on a beautiful Saturday afternoon (crazy, I know), then meeting my friend Antonia for lunch on Grand Avenue. It was great to chat with her and it felt like nothing had changed in the year+ since I'd seen her ... that's always a good feeling.

After lunch, V and I went to meet my friend Cindy, who has a little baby I was excited to meet. V fell asleep in the car on the way there, which led to something she has never done before: I carried her in the house on my shoulder, set her down on the floor, and she kept sleeping. For like an hour. While she slept, Cindy and I caught up about kids and jobs and life, and I got to meet her little one, Griffin.

We had just enough time to pick up Matt, check into our hotel, and head to Uptown. The coolest thing about the hotel? The luggage racks!

 

The glass elevators were also cool.

Matt stayed at the hotel to wait for his friend Kevin; Victoria and I met up with Erika and Aaron for their neighborhood's puppet show. She stood up to see over the crowd and really enjoyed the puppets and people watching.

Still, a little girl's attention span can only last for so long before the stash of crackers needs to be replenished ...

 

After the show, we walked back to Erika and Aaron's house. I put the stroller in the car and took out V's booster seat, since we were going to be eating dinner at Erika and Aaron's. I turned around, and look at what the little girl did ...

She opened up her booster seat right in the street. Silly girl, you can't eat dinner in the street!

We did get to eat outside though ... on Erika and Aaron's screen porch, overlooking their beautiful yard and gardens. What a beautiful summer evening. 

Back at the hotel, I put V to bed. My plan was to enjoy a relaxing hotel room and order a nummy chocolate dessert from room service. And take a hotel shower. You know, totally relax. BUT like V, I was totally exhausted from the day. I just climbed into that king size bed.

Sunday morning, our plans fell through to see friends Sarah and Ben (sick kids), Chad (not feeling well), and Mike and Wendi (their niece's basketball game). We shopped at a couple stores, then drove to Blaine where we met Matt's sister Karen for lunch. We had an awesome chat with her, and V loved seeing her auntie. From there, on to the grad party that started it all. 

 Rocking Daddy's sunglasses at the grad party

Our friends Bruce and Linda hosted the party for their daughter Nicole at a park. V and I spent some time on the slide and swings. Once, after I brought her back to the pavilion, she took off towards the park on her own! This girl sure loves to play hard all the time.

We jetted up the freeway towards home, picked up the pups, and started to prepare for the upcoming week. The weekend went by so fast, but we were all happy to have some time with great friends!

18 months!

Can you believe this girl is 18 months old today?

The last 18 months have been full of more joy, silliness, and love than I could have imagined.

Like her parents, Victoria is our little birder. She watches birds out our window and lets us know when they are at the feeders. She exclaims over every finch hopping along a city sidewalk, every seagull in the McDonald's parking lot.

She loves being outside and will ask to go out by bringing her shoes, or her jacket. If we don't get the message the first time around, she will start bringing us our shoes. As our daycare provider says, "Victoria could live outside!" It's a good thing we have so much open space for her to explore.

Words are her new thing. She's got "uh oh" down pat. She can say "mama" and "dada," plus "owie." She says ba-ba for ball, pa-pa for puppy. She has her own funny way of saying "zoom" when we are in the car. Her animal sounds include a cute (rather wimpy) little lion roar, and saying "ooo ooo" for "woof woof."

Happy 18 months, Baby Girl! We love you so much!