So it's been a long time since I wrote. My last post was dated June 4th, 2017. You won't find that post on the blog anymore because I accidentally deleted it, like a moron.
So many things have happened since that June 4th post, it's like a completely different life.
July 17th, we closed on our new house. Well, my new house. We bought the house Kyle grew up in from his parents, and proceeded to make it our own, knocking out some walls, building new walls in different places, cutting holes in walls to create a Pinterest-style dog kennel out of the useless under-the-stairs closet. My dogs will be patiently waiting for their Hogwarts (Dogwarts? Hogwarts for Dogs?) letters in their room under the stairs.
We worked tirelessly through rest of the summer, just so we could have enough walls and work done to basically camp out in our new home so that Knox could start school. So we moved in bedding and clothes, set up a pretty good bare bones kitchen, and moved in just in time for Meet The Teacher night, the weekend before school would start on Monday.
(ProTip: If you're doing a kitchen renovation, GET. YOUR. SELF. AN. INSTANT. POT. They can do everything and only required one working outlet.)
The same day as Meet The Teacher, it started raining. And then it kept raining. I watched in horror as Hurricane Harvey plowed over my little South Texas hometown and devastate the cities around it. I texted, checking on my best friend, making sure she and her family were all out safely.
It was still raining.
I watched more as Hurricane Harvey crept up the coastline. I watched as Houston went under water. I texted checking on friends there, making sure they were all out of harm's way.
It was still raining.
Harvey sat on top of Southeast Texas for what felt like forever.
The water would flood our streets. It would rise up the driveway. Then there would be a lull in the rain, and we would get a reprieve, and the water would drain out into the bayous, and the rain would start again. It did this for two days.
On the third day, it never stopped raining.
The bayous filled up, overflowed. The drainage ditches couldn't keep up.
We watched as the water came up the driveway again.
We watched as it seeped underneath our garage door, and we worked to get as much of our brand new furniture and still-crated appliances as high as we could get them off the ground.
We watched as the water came up to the front door. I took a Klonopin and went upstairs.
I walked to the top of the stairs to ask Kyle something, and that's when I saw the water inside my house for the first time. Our brand new, freshly textured, unpainted drywall being ruined. Kyle was outside on the phone, sitting on a bucket, ankle-deep in water. I stood silently for a minute, then turned around and went back upstairs.
I came back downstairs, and stepped into water up to my shins. Kyle was still outside on the phone. I opened the door, and I looked down just in time to see a small school of minnows swim in. "Oh. So this is what we're doing now. Okay."
Around 4am, Kyle decided to lay down and take a nap.
I sat at the top of the stairs for a little while, watching the water come up the second step.
I talked to my frantic mother on the phone, and told her everything was going to be okay. I was watching the water, and if we could wait just a few more hours until sunrise, the nice people with the bass boats would be coming back out to get people out of their homes. I had a plan. I wasn't sleeping. I was packing up bags of essentials, while Kyle rested, while our son slept through the entire night, the snuggled up in his bed with him.
I stayed awake so that if he woke up, he didn't walk out to a house filled with water and get scared without a parent talking to him about it first.
At some point, Kyle woke up, and while we were talking, we heard a knock on the door. Our next door neighbor, who lives in a one-story home, had spent hours on top of the kitchen counters with his wife, a very upset cat, and three Bassett Hounds. We immediately told him to come over, they could get out of the freezing cold water, take Knox's bedroom, and stay as long as they needed to. I moved Knox and our dogs to our bedroom, still asleep. Our neighbors came over with the angry cat in a kennel, Kyle helped swim the three dogs across the yard. I pulled out as many dry towels and sheets and blankets as I could find.
The sun started coming up, and we could hear the boat engines starting up, puttering through our streets like some kind of fucked up Venetian nightmare. We let them make a few trips back and forth to the one-story homes around us first, families with small children who had all spent one terrifying night watching their belongings float around the house. That's when the first pang of guilt hit, realizing my baby was asleep, and we were still mostly safe and mostly dry.
We finally flagged down one of the boats and told them we were ready to leave, having spoken to my mother-in-law and arranging a dry place to stay and a ride from the drop-off spot.
We woke Knox up, and explained what was going on. He took it surprisingly well.
Kyle carried Knox, the the dogs, then most of our bags out to the hood of his Jeep. I dug in my flooded car and located Knox's floaties and put them on him.
Then we proceeded to stand in the chest deep water in our driveway for awhile, waiting. Three angels in a bass boat showed up, loaded up my most precious cargo, and we floated away from the home we'd gotten to live in for four whole days.
The water went away, we gutted the house. Kyle dealt with insurance and then FEMA like a champ, and for that, I'm forever grateful.
We were lucky to have not been fully moved, or had our old, completely undamaged house on the market yet, so we moved back in, like we had just taken a small vacation. I re-registered Knox at his old school, he was excited to see his friends again, and go to school with them for a little while longer.
We worked, along with our amazing team of builders, to get our home put back together. We had a goal to be in for Christmas. (We missed the mark by a couple weeks, but I let it slide.)
Tomorrow will be one week we've been in our home. I have a 75% complete kitchen, I'm cooking meals in my Instant Pot, sleeping upstairs. Knox finally got to go to his new school this week, and loves it.
We have seen lots of sunshine, and even a rare, beautiful snow day since the flood.
But we moved back in on a rainy day, and I won't even act like I didn't have trouble falling asleep that first night, laying in the same room where I stayed awake and watched the water keep rising.
