Morris Family in Mexico: Extreme Weather

One thing I love about living in the Portland area is the weather. It can be described as mild. Summer's are warm, but not too hot. Winters are cool, but rarely freezing cold and snowy. Sure it rains a lot, but the amount of 70 degree, neutral days is wonderful.

This year, however, has been full of extreme weather! First we had the drought of this summer. It was so hot in May that I knew there was no way my grass would stay green for the summer. However , the unseasonably hot and dry summer was nothing compared to what has hit us this winter. The month of December set a record for Portland rainfall; in fact, it tied the average in one week (7.5 inches), and then almost doubled that amount for the month (13.5). During all this rain (where it felt like we might float away!), we discovered a huge problem with our house: we had almost 15 inches of standing water in our crawl space!! Yikes! We live close to a creek and the water table is very high here...high enough that water just rises from underground and sits under our house. I'm not going to lie: that rainy week was one of the most stressful of my life. It was full of pumping water, leaking hoses, water in the heater vents, opening and closing crawl space hutch, checking water level in the middle of the night, overflowing gutter pipes, neighbors helping...water, water and more water. Ugh. Water is a big deal up here. Thank the Lord for good neighbors who helped us above and beyond expectations. The short story of the conclusion is we now have a temporary solution (a sump pump installed by husband extraordinaire) and a drainage company will come out later to spring to let us know how much money we get to dump into getting (and keeping) our crawl space dry. It's not the best scenario, but we're thankful that it's not much worse!

Here are some pictures from weird weather event #1. The kids are playing in "Lake Rosie" created by water being pumped out from under our house. At least they made the best of the situation!

Sammy

Josh and Seth's boats

Happy boys playing in the water. Happy Mom to be out of the house.

Next weird weather event at our house was the worst wind storm I have ever witnessed. I don't have any statistics for the storm, but I'm pretty sure the wind might have blown Josh over it was gusting so hard. And the wind blew for most of the day. By one in the afternoon our power was out, and by two in the afternoon we discovered that our neighbor in our back lot had a huge pine tree blow over--literally a foot from their roof. When we went outside to see the roots pulled up, we saw that the people across the street of our back lot had SIX trees fall over, all them missing their house. The power remained out until 8:30 that night, so we had an evening of flashlights and puzzles and games in front of the fireplace. It was quite the adventure.

The neighbors next to our back lot had another tree that was wobbling pretty good during the storm, so they asked if they could fall it into our yard. Here's some pictures of the boys playing in their pine tree houses:

Sam and Josh

Last, but not least in our extreme weather situations is the fact that we got snow again. That's weird for up here! Snow TWICE! The second storm even gave us snow at our house: enough to build a snowman and then Ben pulled the kids in the sled behind the four-wheeler. It was so fun!

I love this picture of the kids in front of our house with the snow coming down!

Sammy and Josh sitting on their snowballs

Sammy made his own snowman (left) and Seth with his large snowball (right)

Josh LOVES the snow. He's all about throwing snowballs, destroying snowmen (much to the big boys' consternation), and finally made his own little snowman (look at his feet on the right hand pic)