Flood

Click!

Did somebody flip a switch?

The day after my last post Sydney really did turn a corner, flip a switch, whatever you want to call it. She is doing much, much better with going potty. She's in underwear most of the time (though she sometimes asks to be put in diapers and we tell her no). She holds it and rarely goes in her underwear anymore.

She's not completely there yet, but she's getting a lot closer. She doesn't always know when she has to go, I think. We have to ask her or make her go sit on the toilet before she will frequently. But even in the morning I don't think I've had a day in the last two weeks where she peed in her over night diaper before we got to the toilet.

And she has had a handful of times where she has gotten herself to the toilet, pulled her pants and undies down and gone pee all on her own. And - ready for this? - there have been at least two times (one of them just this morning) where she has gotten herself to the toilet to poop on her own.

So we're getting much, much closer.

And to answer Grandma B's question from the comments of the last post, yes, Sydney does get upset when she pees (or poops, but that's only happened once or twice) in her underwear. But having it happen and getting upset about it didn't seem to help right away in the training process.

So there's a potty training update. And as appropriate as it might seem, that is not the reason for the title of this post.

We had a very long, cold winter with lots and lots of snow. Record-breaking amounts of snowfall. And that's just here in the city. That's not even mentioning the snow pack up in the mountains.

We had a very late spring here. It stayed cool well into May. The second week of May it really started to get warm and all that snow melted almost all at one time. The lake level rose. The flood gates were opened on the dams on the river. The water rose faster than it could get down the river. (The river was flooded, too.)

The last two weeks of May, during absolutely gorgeous weather - the longest stretch of it to that point this year - they had to put a "no wake" restriciton on the lake. Boats could not go fast enough to leave a (significant) wake in the water. So no water recreation.

A couple days before the flood levels were supposed to reach their peak I took my camera to work. I took some pictures of the water levels. (I did it a few days before the expected peak time because we were going to leave for Vegas the next day and would be gone for the peak.)

Then, a few weeks ago I brought my camera back to work and took some pictures of the lake at the end of summer with "normal" water levels. Below are the pictures. The first one in each pair is the flood level. The second picture in each pair is the same location at normal water levels.

If you want to see slightly larger versions of the pictures you can see them over at my Picture Trail photo albums.

This is City Beach next to the Resort.




This is the City Beach but angled a little further out into the water. On the left side of the picture you can see Independence Point. It's a public dock where daily public lake cruises leave from as well as the parasailing and seaplane tours.




Between City Beach and the west entrance to the Floating Boardwalk that goes around the Resort is the Boardwalk Bar. This is taken from the seating area looking back at the City Beach. If you look closely at the right side of the picture you can see a man standing to the left of the tree and to the right of the white sign. That's just about where I was for the first two sets of pictures above.




The next pictures are taken next to our Corporate Offices next to the Resort (you'll see that building in the next pictures). The closest dock is a City Dock open to the public. The further dock with the blue awnings is part of the Boardwalk Marina, which is private space leased through the marina portion of our Corporation.




These pictures are taken from near the top of the ramp of the Boardwalk Marina entrance you saw in the last pictures. The large wooden building is the Corporate Offices. The small, cooper-roofed building near the right side of the picture is the Boardwalk Bar where I took the earlier pictures. The City Beach is beyond that.




The Boardwalk Marina wraps around the south end, lake side of the Resort. At the water's edge we have a nice grassy area with steps down toward the water. People sit there and during the (nicer days of the) summer we have live music out there in the evenings. It's called the Floating Stage area because of the stage off the boardwalk where the musicians play (barely seen on the left side of each picture).