And the floods came up

It was a particularly rainy Tuesday in April.  I had just put the babies down for a nap when I looked outside to notice what appeared to be little lakes developing in our backyard.  I called Kyle to tell him it was raining so hard our backyard was getting lakes and that's when I looked under the window to see that the whole north side of our yard was flooded.

Like this.

And then I kind of panicked.

We figured a sprinkler pipe had burst so Kyle left work and I put on my boots and winter coat to shut our water off.  I then gathered up buckets and a cooler and attempted to bail water out of the yard for an hour while Kyle was stuck in traffic and the babies still napped.

It is no secret that I have weak arms.

This was very, very hard for me.

I used the buckets to fill the cooler, then drug the cooler all the way across our yard to dump it out.  We live on about 1/3 of an acre....  I had a long way to go (for weak arms, you know).

And then I had a meltdown.

Kyle came home.

Babies woke up.

It rained some more.

I took Avery to the doctor (nine month checkup!) and by the time I came home, the rain had died down and Kyle had made no progress in alleviating the water situation.  It seemed like no matter what we did, the water would not go down.  And when we realized the REAL source of the water, this made a lot more sense.  Kyle looked over our fence to discover water pouring from our neighbor's yard.  It was THEIR sprinkler pipe that had burst!  I felt bad for them but glad for us but also still a little sad for us (and my weak arms).

Once we got their water shut off, we used buckets to haul water into our emptied garbage cans and were able to clear out the water in about an hour.

And I was sore for 3 days.