The Blogging of the Billmeiers: VBS and the Next Great Flood

In a little over a week our church is holding our VBS (for the non-churched or non-Protestants of my blog fan base, that stands for Vacation Bible School where, for one week, kids come to the chuch to participate in games, crafts, and stories based on the Bible). I have committed myself to being in charge of the preschool portion of this as well as decorating the preschool area. Since my artistic abilities are non-existant, I recruited my art-abled niece Brooke and also put Audra, Keith and Addison to work as well. The theme of the VBS is science, so we've made DNA strands, molecules, gears, light bulbs, magnets, flasks, beakers and Bible-based periodic tables to decorate the rooms. We found out the hard way that if you try to spray paint styrofoam, the propellent MELTS the styrofoam (and, hence, Nana saves the day by running to Hobby Lobby for more styrofoam balls!!). It looks like hard work, and a big mess, but we had fun doing it.

Making styrofoam molecules

The crafting mess

Some finished wall decorations (on top of my laundry piles!)

Now...for the real news of the week...THE RAIN!! My goodness! I really keep thinking I'm going to one day look out my window and see animals walking in pairs toward a large watercraft. Thankfully, I was able to get all my garden planting done before all this rain. As you can see below, the corn (and the surrounding weeds) in my front garden are doing great. This is because that garden is on a slope. The back garden is not fairing so well, with only part of the beans,beets, squash and cucumbers coming up through the puddles. As far as damage to our place from all this rain...I really can't complain. I've heard some of your horror stories of 4 day power outages or raw sewage backing up into your basement. While the softball diamonds just down the street from us has turned into a lake, we have only minor puddles in our yard. The wind blew down a down spout, but it was already loose from a previous windstorm earlier this year. And we have some leaks in our basement and garage, but thankfully the only damage to our stuff was mildew growing on our umbrella strollers in the garage. (and the basement is guaranteed, so no money to fix it! Yay!!)

Front garden of corn (and lots of weeds)

Back garden

Our downed downspout

Basement leak. It was actually coming from a leak in the chinking of the brick wall and looked just like a Dutch Dam Leak that a little Dutch boy could hold closed with his finger!! Thankfully there was nothing in front of it and the stuff around it was sitting on a pallet, so no water damage to our luggage collection.

Garage leak. Seems to be a result of bad flashing around that completely useless chimney. Yeah, thats right, we have a chimney in our garage. The dork that used to live here wanted a pot-bellied stove out there so he could work out in the garage during the winter. Unfortunately, it seems that he didn't know how to install it correctly. May result in a costly repair to the roof, so we'll have to get someone to look at it.

The coolest part of all these storms...last night about 9 p.m. there was a break in the action and a VERY BRIGHT double rainbow appeared. We had to pull the just-bedded kids out of bed so they could see it, it was so awesome! God must have known that we needed a little reminding about his promise!!!

Rainbow