My Gutters Have Been Cleaned!

And not by my husband.

(Ahem. Okay. Promising to behave myself now.)

We finally found some home repair folks to fix our water problems. A team of one loud guy and one quiet guy arrived yesterday while the kids and I were on the front porch watching the rain.

Loud Guy asked if I had a water hose, so I plucked my daughter from her precarious perch on the porch glider and took her with me the short distance to enter the code on the garage door opener. Loud Guy said, "Hey, let me hold 'er. She's gonna get wet!"

"Thank goodness," I said, handing my child over to the almost complete stranger, "because, well, she's never been wet before. We've always had her dry cleaned."

Okay, okay.

What I really said was, "She'll be all right. It'll just take me a second," and I took her with me. It was only sprinkling, and the kid had been climbing down from the porch and darting out into the yard just to make me chase her, so she had already proven she wouldn't melt, and I was worried she might turn the glider over since she did turn a rocking chair over last week.

Loud Guy followed us, trying to hold his jacket over her head and breathing right in her face as he told her he wouldn't want her to get sick.

Once Loud Guy found the water hose, the kids and I went inside so we wouldn't be in the way (read: so the kids wouldn't try to climb the ladder). Then it was time for an afternoon snack, which my children ate happily at the picture window, sippy cups resting on the window sill, heads tilted back and eyes peering up at Quiet Guy's feet on the ladder, gazes occasionally following a small clump of leaves as it was tossed to the ground.

Loud Guy followed their gaze, looked at the leaves on the front lawn, and yelled up, "Hey, put them leaves in a bag! I got a bag right here!"

Then Loud Guy announced he'd found the source of our basement leak: a crack in the concrete drain in front of the garage. He fixed it with some concrete caulking maybe.

Maybe. We've already had to mop up several gallons of water downstairs, but it did rain quite a bit before Loud Guy and Quiet guy got everything fixed. We'll have to wait until the next rain to find out if our money was well spent.

After they left, I looked out the window at the back yard and saw that Quiet Guy had gone back to dumping leaves into the yard when Loud Guy wasn't looking. So after my husband got home, I raked them up in the rain . . . which only proves how desperate I was to get out of the house for a while.

Yea, Me-Time.