OUR Very Own Island Story Part 5~When the Flood Waters Came

And they did come!! The year our 6th child was born. Try keeping 5 kids from falling off the porch into the river when you have a tummy as big as a barn!! Actually it wasn't so bad. Just made life even more interesting. Juli and Vance Jr. had tons of fun rowing all over the yard watching the walleye and carp spawning in the waters. Sometimes they jumped so high they nearly came into the little boat!

I'm pretty sure the kids didn't do a whole lot of swinging on the swing set that summer. The little apartment/garage out back doubled as our storage overflow and whenever we needed anything from it we just hopped in the john boat and rowed over to it!!

Grocery shopping actually became easier because once they were loaded on the little john boat on the other side of the river there was no need to unload them again until we got right up to our back porch. Normally, we would pull the boat up on land and unload and carry them to the kitchen. In this way we saved a trip!

Almost looks like daddy is holding a bag of flour or sugar he retrieved from the little apartment behind the house!! It didn't take us long to develop the habit of ensuring that we had plenty of extras in our pantry while we lived here. Grocery shopping was NOT an easy task nor a fun one so I tried to make sure we were stocked up on the staples!!

Now this is what I call 'front door service!' The water in the yard area got anywhere from 3-5 feet deep depending on where you were. In this photo above the waters had receded quite a bit because the water got as high as the front porch at one point. So the little boat served us well because the pontoon couldn't drive in such shallow waters. So we went from the porch, to the john boat, row out to the pontoon and climb from the row boat into the pontoon. THAT was NOT easy considering how preggo I was with my first 10 lb. baby!!

The photo above was that of our front porch. It's a great view of the entire river that overflowed right up to our porch! One morning we woke up to find a small boat accompanied by a fisherman sitting in our front yard fishing. Just feet from our steps!! How weird is that?

Try imagining children playing on the front porch of a country home wearing life jackets!! One of the girls, I can't remember which one right now made the comment; "G, we can't even step onto the porch without putting that stupid life jacket on!" "We promise mom, we won't get off the porch!" Most likely it was Kim since she was nearer to 4-5 years old and that's probably something a child of that age would say!!