Another Evening in the Basement

Jay and I made it home in between storms yesterday (and before all the highways and streets started flooding and closing down), quickly fed the kids, and then made it down to the basement just as the sirens were going off in our city. Our poor Milwaukee neighbors to the north (literally, the house next store and beyond) were all flooded during the last 4+ inch storm and with the 7+ inches that fell in two hours last night there was absolute chaos on the roads and insane amounts of water on the streets and in houses. Above is a picture that Jay took of the river flowing down our street, but what you don't see is where all the water was flowing to downstream, and at the end of our block the cars parked along the main road had water up to their windows. (at least we didn't have an SUV stuck in sink hole like there was 6miles to our east). And since we were not hit by one of the 10 tornadoes, and we were not flooded with water inside our house, and we were lucky enough to maintain our power throughout all the storms passing through, we had a grand old time in our basement. The girls stayed up a bit later than usual due to the excitement of everything going on around them and their new found mobility. A few weeks ago they would have just fallen asleep where we placed them on the floor, but now that Leah can sit up on her own and Hannah can roll over and put herself up into crawl position they can pretty much do as they please. Leah was actually moving one leg and dragging the other (not crawling, but some other peculiar form of movement) across the room to the toy box, and then pulling herself up onto her knees to try to dig around inside of the toy box. Hannah was on all fours, and lifting one leg into the air as if she was about to move a knee forward to crawl, but instead it looked more like lifting a leg to pee on a tree. Both girls were fascinated by Rosco's paws. Since Joseph isn't new to moving around, he was just fine sitting on the couch watching Monster's Inc. But he was happy to try to play with the girls on the floor when the movie was over (we were actually trying to get him to leave the girls alone so that they could sleep, and I was able to lure him into playing with me instead over the idea of "building" something).