Wading Pool?

When my kids first saw the downstairs they were thrilled. They thought Porter and I had made them an indoor wading pool. The first thing they did was strip down to their underwear. They were running and jumping and having the time of their life. This picture is of Brynlie on her boat. She found a piece of particle board and two screwdrivers as paddles and she was trying to row herself around. Didn't work, but she still had fun. Porter and I spent most of the day yesterday trying to clean up the water. It took us several hours to get things organized and then Porter started to use our big wet vac to get the water up. He cleaned up about 70-80 gallons just with the vacuum and had to haul that outside to dump. The girls were trying to help us sweep some of the water towards the drain, but we couldn't put too much down the drain because our septic system wouldn't be able to handle it because the ground is already so wet outside.

We also had a bunch of carpet scraps that we had laid down so the girls would have somewhere to play down there and all of those were soaked so Porter had to hang all those up so they could dry. After many hours we finally got it to where we thought the rest of the water would just evaporate and we would be done with this mess. We had set up two large fans to help it along. Later that night we went down to see if this had helped and most of the water was back. It had rained a bunch last night and I guess the water had no where to go again but in our basement so we are back to square one. Our whole house just stinks. The new house smell has gone and has been replaced with a musty wet gross smell. I'm really just sad. The girls ended up getting coughs and runny noses. I don't know if their cold was hurried along by playing in the cold water in their underwear or not, but I'm not letting them play in the water again.