Hot Child in the City

It's not officially summer yet but the temperature outside sure feels like it is! The heat combined with the humidity have made for some very long days. The lack of air conditioning has made for even longer days! Our fingers are crossed that the air conditioner will be fixed tomorrow. The warm weather is the perfect time for a sunhat but Anna has decided hats are more fun to eat than wear!

Anna's new favorite thing is to lift things up over her head....she does this with her toys....

With her tops.....



With Daddy's shirt....

Anna kept lifting one of Alastair's shirts over her face and as much as I tried to get a photo all I could get was the happy look on her face when she dropped it!

A little bit of everything

Anna is such a happy baby...always full of smiles! This week she has really been a chatterbox. Baby babble can be heard all day...some of her favorite sounds to make this week are ba, ba, da, da...Anna also started crawling this week and while she loves to be on the move she is also trying to pull herself to reach things...baby is getting mobile!

About a month ago we noticed a bird working very hard at building a nest in the arbor on our deck. Last weekend we were able to get our first glimpse of the baby birds that the nest is providing a home for! At the top of the nest you can see a small little beak...

There are 2 baby birds in the nest. I believe the birds are an American Robin but I think the babies look a bit like a Velociraptor from Jurassic Park!

This a a picture of the greenway a few blocks from our house. It goes along a small creek...unfortunately the creek flooded with all the rain and the greenway has a lot of damage.

The greenway is also next to a golf course which also suffered a lot of damage. We found it amusing that despite the damage the serious golfers were still out playing a round of golf!

On Sunday we went to the Shelby Bottoms Greenway for a walk. This greenway runs along the Cumberland River which obviously flooded. What looks like dead brush in the picture is actually the line of mud from how high the river and flood waters rose last week.

Anna enjoying a ride on Daddy's shoulders during our walk!

Flood 2010

Many thanks to all for the calls of support during this difficult and crazy time! Our basement filled with almost 5 feet of water but it is now dry and the only damaged we suffered so far is the loss of our a/c unit, furnace and possibly the water heater. We're hoping the foundation hasn't been damaged but that is yet to be determined. Nashville has been declared a national disaster area which opens the doors to FEMA. While it's not fun having the damage we have occur, thousands of people in Nashville have lost everything and we are lucky that the water was limited to our basement. Please keep the city of Nashville in your thoughts...the damage to the city has been estimated to reach a billion dollars....
Thank you to everyone for checking in on us and I'm happy to say we are all safe!

Rain, Rain Go Away

This was taken on Thursday, April 29...it was a bright sunny day and the peonies looked amazing.....

On Friday night the rain came and came and came....the peonies did not like the rain.
It rained a pouring rain until 5:00 Sunday evening.....it's estimated we got close to 20 inches of rain! 20 inches of rain in less than 48 hours....it felt like the rain was never going to stop.

This is what 20 inches of rain in such a short amount of time looks like.....the earth cannot absorb that much rain and the water has to go somewhere. At our house the water decided to fill the crawl space underneath our house. These are the stairs that go down to the crawl space....

This is the water being pumped out of underneath our house. Our very kind neighbor came to my rescue when I asked for help....My plea went something like this,"My husband is out of the country and our basement is flooded...I don't know what to do!!"

The good news is that as of this posting the rain has stopped and the pump is working at removing the water....It started with only being able to see the top 2 steps...now we can see the fourth step down!!!