Fighting Fires

Some of you may be under the impression I haven't been as consistent in my daily postings because my husband is now home and we're spending endless hours of quality time together. Although we're making some effort towards that, the truth is that for the past two days we've been putting out fires it seems. It started Wednesday night when a wind storm blew out our power. When the power came back on we discovered we had lost everything on the hard drive of our computer. For Brad this news was extremely frustrating because it meant basically we had a new computer that needed to have all our software reinstalled. I was only concerned with one thing...my pictures.

I don't think I've been able to blog for a few days as I digest the news that the majority of my photos for the past months are gone. I have certain segments of photos from Brad's deployment time frame but for the most part the pictures were on my hard drive still and I had yet to print them and most foolishly I had yet to back them up on another drive. I'm fortunate that I have some photo obsessed friends like myself that have taken some pictures of my kids this summer...but I'm still finding it hard to admit that a lot of the every day photos of Brooke achieving little milestones and the girls being generally goofy are gone. Here I was working so hard to have my third child not be able to say when she grows up that there aren't any pictures of her as a baby and now there will be a little more merit to that argument. I scrapbook and each girl has a first year album...I guess I'll have to get creative and have an album filled with 5x7's to make it look full.

In the past 48 hours my love for my blog has grown exponentially. Thanks to my blog I at least have photos of some of our milestones and some of our adventures. I'm glad I was so faithful in making frequent entries and boring all of you with pictures of my kids!

So that was our first fire...it's still not fully extinguished and we're still processing the damage done. On Tuesday night around 10:00pm we suddenly decided to buy a new stove and dishwasher so when we sell our house (my next blog entry) we could feature "New Kenmore Stainless Steal Appliance Package." The housing market is decent around here but not great right now and we want to move the house quickly if possible so we decided for the small investment it would require it would be worth it to give our kitchen a small facelift so it makes a great first impression. By Wednesday morning our appliances had been ordered and set up for a Thursday delivery. Things were going too smoothly which is why when I received the phone call from Brad saying that he had accidentally shattered the new ceramic stove top while installing it I wasn't too surprised. Our second fire. Fortunately Sears took some responsibility for how the glass broke since Brad was trying to remove some of the peel off protective covering that the delivery men had forgotten to remove from the perimeter of the stove surface when the incident occurred. Saturday morning we're supposed to get another new stove delivered at no expense to us. Two thumbs up for Sears. However we will spend two hours of our day today driving to Kent to the Sears Service Center to pick up a trim kit that we need for the perimeter of the stove top. This is becoming one of those projects that sounded quick and easy in theory and is evolving.

The same would be true with the installation of our new dishwasher. We decided to forego the installation service since it almost doubled the expense of the dishwasher and do it ourselves. Do you see where this is going. My husband is extremely handy, but plumbing is not his forte. Due to a little miscommunication between us (I'm his assistant)...we had about 30 seconds of hot water spraying wildly out a tube under the dishwasher. It sprayed both of us, the walls, the ceiling, the windows, etc. Thankfully we were both laughing about the whole thing moments after we were mopping up the mess. I'm happy to say that we've successfully washed our first load of dirty dishes. So far, so good.

Fire number three, in my opinion ( and maybe only be understood by a few of you who have ever fought the same battle) was my trip to the commissary for Thanksgiving grocery shopping. That is really all I need to say about fire number three. You either understand or you don't!

In a few hours we're headed out for family pictures, hopefully this won't become a fire. Then off for a scenic drive to Kent for our stove. At least we'll have some quality family time!