Phoebe and puddles

We had some big storm systems roll through recently. We were on tornado watch all day on Friday...and once again we didn't breathe a word of this to Alexander since a tornado watch simply means that conditions are ripe for tornadoes, not that there's one ripping around the neighbourhood (that's what a tornado warning is when we take action).

Here are a couple of pictures of Zoë and Phoebe from before the storm hit:

Our poor little drainage system was malfunctioning and our yard was quickly filling up with water, so I ran outside in the pouring rain to try to fix things (I just had to remove some debris (leaves and stuff) covering some storm drains, etc.) and then water started moving more freely to the creek in the back yard. And then the rain stopped being quite so ferocious and the little kids all came outside to play.

Phoebe loved it.

They all loved it, of course.

But it was Phoebe's first time really stomping around in rain puddles and she loved it.

Here are a few pictures of the kids enjoying the aftermath:

Our neighbours up the street are getting some landscape work done, so their red soil is all uncovered and was just washing away in the gutter.

For the record, these storm drains terrify me. 

When I was a child, the storm drains we had were small rectangles cut into the gutter, fitted with a cover. My sister Abra once told me that I was skinny enough to fall through the grate and I believed her and spent the next several years jumping over storm drains—you wouldn't catch me stepping on one, even though it was quite clear no human could actually fall through a storm drain like that. 

However, while Vancouver is prone to constant drizzling, it doesn't get as many heavy rainstorms as we do out east. So, out here our storm drains have to be ready to guzzle rainwater, so we have these large-enough-to-swallow-a-child chasms!

You can see it behind the girls in the picture above (I had Zoë standing there so that Phoebe wouldn't slip and take a little waterslide ride through the sewer (a logical fear, I'm sure—like, I'm not really sure a child could fall down a drain like this, but I also don't really want to test it out)).

Anyway, those drains make me nervous. 

Alexander won't even walk by them on dry days (he's afraid of them, too), but Phoebe doesn't really have that kind of life-preserving natural fear of things. She's...too wild for that. So I had to work to keep her away from the drain (she wanted to explore where all that water was going in such a gurgling rush), but she was pretty happy as long as she was sill allowed to splash.

She was not happy about being called in for dinner, and started kicking and screaming about it, but then I handed her off to Grandpa (who had been out driving with Rachel in the rain; she was white-knuckling the steering wheel the whole time) and she was so surprised by this pass-off that she forgot about throwing a fit.

So Grandpa carried that soggy baby all the way inside and joined us for dinner.