Weekends

So we spend Sunday evening 6:00-ish  through Saturday morning 10:30-ish at Camp Steiner, making the two-hour journey in our big ol' van each time.  Our weekend at home is about 28 hours long.  Since we've just been camping for an entire week we come home and do laundry. A lot of laundry.

Our first weekend home was stressful, partly because we'd just spent about eleven days at Steiner and had extra laundry to do and partly because after eleven days at camp we realized there were several things we needed to buy to get us through the summer.  So we started some laundry and Bruce and I went shopping, leaving the kids with instructions to keep an eye on the laundry and keep it moving.
The kids did keep an eye on the laundry—in kid fashion—while the shopping trip took much, much longer than we'd hoped.  At 10 p.m. we still had about three-quarters of the laundry left to do, church the next morning, lunch/dinner to figure out for Sunday, and the van to be packed up.  I woke up at 6 a.m. Sunday and started doing laundry, went to church for an hour and then back home to work some more.  We managed to leave the house around 5:15 or so.

Last weekend I had a mild tantrum and made it pretty clear that I did  not want a repeat of the previous weekend, with me doing 90% of everything to get ready.  Last weekend went much, much smoother.  The kids did all the laundry, helped pack the van and we still left the valley around 5:00 p.m.  But I was much happier.

This weekend Bruce had to come home early because he had a class to teach on Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.  We left camp around 8:30 p.m. and got home at about 10:30.  We were all feeling pretty happy and ready for our break—a much easier break this time because of the four to five extra hours to get our work done on Saturday.  I imagined this leisurely day of doing the laundry and getting the house clean early—maybe even by noon—and then relaxing.  Writing my blog, going shopping, seeing a movie . . .  Yay!

Here's what really happened:  When we got home at 10:30 the first thing I noticed  was that the house was pretty stinky; my first thought was that the cat had pooped somewhere.  I checked for cat poo or vomit, but there was none to be found. Then I got a holler from downstairs, "Our bedroom floor is all wet!"

Sure enough, the girls' bedroom must have had a great flood sometime during the past week.  The floor looked dry, but when I stepped on it water squirted up between my toes.  We decided the best thing to do at 11 p.m. was to haul their mattresses upstairs, let them sleep in the living room, and clean up in the morning.

When I pressed my feet down, water droplets shot up a couple inches. 
You can't see that, but you can see how wet the floor was.

So I went outside to unpack some things that needed freezing and discovered that our garage freezer and refrigerator had shut off.  Everything in the freezers—three turkeys and a few roasts—was thawed, although still cold; fortunately the refrigerator was empty. Now any good housewife would have probably started cooking that meat to save it.  I brought it into the house and hid it away in the inside freezer.  Hopefully none of us will die of food-poisoning later.

After we got the kids situated, and the meat in the freezer, I got on facebook to whine about it a little.

beds in the living room
:-/

Saturday morning I hid in my room for about an hour longer than I should have; I did not want to face the day. I might not have gotten up at all had I not had a phone call from my good friend Scerinda. She'd seen my cry out on facebook and offered to do some of my laundry, lent me a wet/dry vac, and brought us dinner that evening when she brought the clean laundry back. Wow.  I also got a fb message from Nancy Bradbury who brought me another wet/dry vac, a carpet fan, and took away some of my laundry. And Brittany Jenkins also did some of my laundry.  Melanie brought me her carpet cleaner, too.

While bringing the beds upstairs, we shattered a light fixture.

taking furniture out to the garage . . .

. . . and there it all is

We spent about 2 1/2 hours taking furniture and stuff out of the girls' room and putting it into the garage, then another 4 hours vacuuming water out of their carpet.  Did I ever mention that I hate carpet? A tiled floor would never have had this problem. (We blew the fuse in their room too.  I should have known better than to plug  in three carpet cleaners in the same room.) We emptied at least 50 gallons of water out of the various machines we were using.

cleaning up the water . . .
. . . sort of

But, while Lindsey, Jason and I sucked water out of the basement, the other kids kept the rest of the house reasonably clean, and our good friends did a lot of our laundry.  Things could have been much worse. And after all the excitement of the day, Lindsey sprung for a movie for the whole family; we watched Brave.  :-) Thanks, Lindsey!

Now it's Sunday.  We've been to church; I'm fixing dinner; we're going to get packed up and be on our way again.  The funny thing is, that as anxious as we are to come home on the weekends, I find that I can hardly wait to go back to camp each week.  I want to go home.