Come Hell or High Water

I learned the meaning of that phrase today, and I've decided they're pretty much equal.

This morning started off with both Emma and I feeling frumpy. I had a headache and I think her teeth were bothering her. After her 20 minute morning nap I came up with the brilliant idea to get out of the house. Maybe she'd sleep in the car and we'd both get a change of scenery. We headed up to the mall since I need to get her some clothes for the fall. No sleeping, but we enjoyed the change for a couple of hours and found some good deals (25% off baby and kids clothes at Old Navy this week). When we left it started to pour...so hard that I figured it couldn't rain that hard for more than, say, 10, 15 minutes, so we got in the car anyway since it was about lunch time.

Traffic on the 17 was a bugger, and visibility was terrible, and Emma was crying, so about 10 minutes into the ride home I pulled over and fed Emma my emergency Gerber container. When I got back on the road she fell asleep (hooray!) but the rain was coming down like it was a hurricane and I could see maybe 25 feet in front of me. Yes, I know, I probably should have pulled over, but by the time I realized that we were on a stretch of the road with few businesses and I figured I should just keep going, slowly but steadily, and get home. I'm still a good 20 minutes from home (under normal conditions) when there are a few cars in front of me that stop because of a huge puddle--okay, lake--in the middle of the road. I was already worried but at this point I started to freak out. I'm stuck in the middle of a road, it's still pouring, the water is rising, cars are lining up behind me and I can't turn around (thank you concrete Jersey barriers). I call Dave on my half-charged cell phone (sorry, I don't have pictures because I didn't know how long I'd be stuck there and I didn't want it to die) who looks online and tells me that apparently there's a tiny patch of red (whatever the heaviest color rainfall is) stuck over a couple of towns in northern Jersey. Meanwhile Emma wakes up and starts screaming again. I gave her some Tylenol and took her out of the seat, since we'd been there for at least 15 minutes and obviously weren't going anywhere. I'm panicking and I don't know what to do, and I debate calling the police, but since it's not a real emergency (yet) I don't want to call 911 (though I don't want to wait until it becomes a real emergency either). So we're sitting there for another 15 minutes and along comes a police officer walking up the line of cars ("sorry, miss, you're just in a bad spot, you'll have to wait it out"). His solution was to walk up to the car at the very front and talk him into driving through the mini-lake (I have no idea how deep, but probably about a foot). The cars in front of me start slowly moving again, so I maneuver around to get Emma back into her seat and drive through the pond (and a few more) before I make it onto another, higher, road that gets me back to Jersey City.

Jersey City was absolutely dry. We made it home and I gave Emma a bath. I think I forgot to mention that in her crying she was so upset that she threw up. Poor girl. The kicker is that the forecast today was "slight chance of showers, with the heavy rain on Tuesday." Ugh. If you need to find me tomorrow I will be at home, grateful that I live on the second floor.