Day 2

8:15 p.m.
Announcement! We're having a work party on Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m. If you'd like to come help, we would be so happy to have you! (Adults and teens only, please. It's not quite like taking a tour through a model home.)
Salvaging sure is an interesting experience. I got to walk through the kitchen today on top of about a foot of what used to be roof. I felt so tall! And we found a library book that wasn't sooooo horribly damaged that it might actually be good enough to clean up and return to the library! Woohoo!

3:25 p.m.
Photos!
I also corrected that pants size that I forgot earlier. (see below)

3:15 p.m.
I forgot to mention earlier that the 2nd Grade at Indian Hills Elementary is gathering resources to help us set up our school again. This makes me cry every time I think about it! Those kids are so awesome! I want to give them all a big hug. Hopefully I'll get a chance. (Sylvia, I'm going to call you. Really, I am. If you don't hear from me, call me because it means I've forgotten to get your number.)

2:00 p.m.

Wow! So much to do, so much to say, so little computer access. I'm going through withdrawl from my computer. We're staying at a Residence Inn and it has wireless internet, but I tell ya, it's pretty useless without a computer.

Last night we got settled in at our short-term home. I got all the kids' clothes sorted and put away, and rather suspect that Drew has almost as many clothes now as she did before. Wow! Thank you all so much! The familes from her gym were incredibly generous, and I think she has as many leotards now as she did before.

Short leotard story there. I had been working on an article "How to Wash a Leotard" for wikiHow and had hung all of Drew's leotards - including her competition leo, which I had just washed - in a neat little row in the laundry room so that I could take photos for the article. I haven't been able to get back in there yet, but from what I have seen the entire basement was completely torched. She had one leotard left - the one she was wearing to gym that afternoon. It's one of those things that I keep thinking, "If only I had just put the leotards back in the bag, they'd be smelly and wet but recoverable." My favorite musing so far was, "If only I had loaned out my computer to the Tidwells, instead of the old garden clippers." Ah well. I can dream, right?

I have photos to post, but will have to work on that in a little while.

We're working on salvage today. I think the only things that will be coming out of our two rooms downstairs are the kids' xbox games and the few dvds I had on a bookcase down there. I maintain hope that my Spiderman dvds will be recoverable - if I can get into the bedroom upstairs.

The room I was using as my office is completely unrecognizable. My desk, computer, and everything there is now a little mound on the floor. The front room with all our school-related bookshelves was only recognizable by the misshapen lumps that used to be shelves and furniture. Water poured out of the beloved - and now melted - xbox when we picked it up.

Hunter is proud to be helping with the salvage efforts, and thrilled that we're considering him old enough and mature enough to do things the other kids can't - like have his own keycard to the hotel room. He really is mature enough, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to show him that we know it.

We may be able to find Drew's dance bag under the rubble in the bedroom. It would have shoes, tights, and leotards - if they are recoverable. Someone braved the floor in there and found the boys' scout shirts in the closet - unsinged! They are being cleaned. I don't know where Drew's scout vest was, however. It may turn up somewhere - possibly in the basket of mending to have a patch sewn on? That was upstairs, too, and may be recoverable. (Why do I want to recover my mending?)

I'll have to think about what school resources we had that we could actually contact a company about. Hunter & Drew were using Saxon math books and the DIVE CD's, but they disliked them and I had been checking eBay this week for Math-U-See products, instead. Duncan was working in the 3rd-grade-level Miquon math workbooks.

Funny math story there. Duncan loves math and sarcastically commented in a tragic voice just hours after the fire, "Oh nooo! Now I'll have to do my math workbooks all over again!" We just rolled our eyes, because we know that's probably something he'd be happy to do.

Updated list of things we need:

--list moved to most recent entry--

Thank you all! Thank you Thank you!