42 Days

I wrote about our lovely water problems in our basement awhile ago. Finally, after 42 days, we got our family room back. Because of the broken pipe, we had water all over our family room, which meant we had to have sheet rock cut out and replaced, the walls and ceiling painted, and the carpet replaced. The first steps happened pretty quickly, but the carpet took forever. We kind of had to get used to living without our entire basement, because all the furniture was piled up in the other rooms. Our family room had a cement floor with nail strips all around the edge for over a month! We are all lucky we didn't step on any. It was hard to not be able to bring Tyler downstairs at all, but it wasn't safe for him. So needless to say, 42 days later, we were very excited! The carpet was put in about a week and a half ago. Tyler and I had to stay home all day while it was happening. And that turned out to be great. It was a little rainy out anyway and Tyler was fascinated by everything going on. This is how we spent almost every minute he was awake.

The carpet guys had pretty loud music, so there was a lot of dancing too! It was a pretty fun day. And at the end of it, we had a carpeted, and usable basement! We still have to hang things back up on the walls, but at least we have our room back!

Tyler was so excited when the door opened up and he could actually go down to look at it. He learned how to go up the stairs right after Thanksgiving, but he hadn't learned to go down them yet. He would just try to walk right off, with no fear or caution. We've tried to teach him to slide down, but he was 100% non-interested. He wanted to walk down like we walked down. Which meant our stairs were always off limits. But the day we got our carpet in, that all changed. It was like a whole new world opened up for him.

What a champ.

This is all he wants to do now. The only thing he wants to use his toys for is to throw them down the stairs. He goes up and down over and over again until we tell him he has to do something else. It is easily his favorite thing to do. Every day a whole new collection of toys migrates from the living room upstairs to the bottom of the stairs in the family room. He has a bunch of farm and alphabet magnets that we keep in a little basket in the kitchen and I think he could spend hours throwing them down over and over again.