Fun on the 4th

Friday morning Matt, Grace, and I enjoyed some coffee and breakfast (Grace had spent the night), then headed to a bike trail for a 16 mile bike ride. I have found so many good trails around here lately. And we just got a bike rack as a joint anniversary gift, so we can go on a lot more of them now. This one we drove a couple miles to, then hopped on in the middle and headed one direction to end up at a park, then turned around and came back. The other direction goes by the Grand River and to some more parks and the zoo on the other side of the river. The whole thing is about 14 miles though, so that round trip would be a bit much. We'll have to work ourselves up to that. Anyways, here are some pics (notice how I am sporting my new hydration backpack that I got for my birthday... I LOVE it! I can drink water while riding my bike, and it stays nice and cool in there too)...

The three of us at Douglas Walker Park.

My helmet is very lopsided...

Soon after we got back from the bike ride, our friend Andrea (who was in town for a wedding) stopped by to see us for a little bit. It's always fun to see friends you haven't seen in a while (since our wedding)! We grilled up some burgers and chowed down on watermelon and chips and guacamole... it was a great summery sort of afternoon! That night we went to hangout with Matt's aunt and uncle and cousins at Sandy Pines, which is a summer trailer park/resort sort of place on a lake where everyone gets around on golf carts. It's about 30 min from our house. We chatted, played some beach volleyball, got some more bug bites, and watched the fireworks over the lake :).

Here is a picture of Matt and I right before the fireworks.

On Wednesday of this past week, we had a big storm with tons and tons of rain. I don't think I've ever seen it rain so much and hard in such a short time in my life, you could barely see across the street at several points. The news said that we got about 4 inches in like 12 hours, and they got more like 6 inches a little bit south of us. They also said that 6 inches is a hurricane amount of rain! Anyways, there was a lot of flooding and power outages and trees down and such in our area. We fared pretty well, but we did get a little bit of water in one corner in the basement that we think came in through the chimney :-/.

On my drive to work on Thursday morning, the streets were a mess with leaves and branches and dirt that had been washed onto them. I was the second person to get to our daycare, and the girl who opened ran out to my car to tell me that our entire basement had flooded! The infant and toddler rooms are down there and the tile had puddles all over it and the carpet was so wet that a pool formed around your foot when you stepped on it. We couldn't get ahold of our director, so we had to decide quickly how to deal with the situation. We ended up calling all the infant's parents and telling them their room was closed and they could not come in, and we moved the toddlers upstairs to join the preschool room. Then I spent the morning mopping the floors, moving stuff off of the carpets, dragging rugs outside to dry, opening windows, turning fans on, and setting anything else that got wet out to dry. We guessed that there had been 3-4 inches of standing water down there at one point! Anyways, it was a crazy day, and our director did finally get back to us and came in after 1.5-2 hours. I felt bad because she had to spend the entire day sucking water out of the carpets. There was also a trench in the wood chips on our playground where a river of water had washed through. It was 2-3 feet wide!

One final note.... Evangeline is 2 months old today!! And I get to see her in 11 days!! Here are a couple of pics of her in the wading pool at Greenlake.