A preschool without water...

Yesterday morning I happened upon a sign on our street that said, "Avion water on your street will be turned off Thursday at 9:00am".

"YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!" I thought to myself...

16 preschoolers and three teachers...no flushing toilets...no running water...

So I set out to assess the situation we would face on Thursday.

After many phone calls the job supervisor at the water department told me he thought the job could take only 15-30 minutes, but that it could possibly be an hour or two. That sounded GREAT to me after having initially heard that it would be a minimum of 2-4 hours!

So we decided to take the risk of staying at the school, instead of the suggested idea of a spontaneous field trip...which would have required MUCH scrambling for transportation and would have been quite costly.

Our licensor recommended (as did the water company) that we stock up with plenty of water to manually fill the toilet tank, run over washing hands, and use for drinking...just in case.

So this morning started with this...

I filled all those jugs and buckets with water and placed them in strategic locations (orange jug for drinking water remained on the kitchen counter)

 

(these buckets remained behind the gate, out of reach of children...for dumping into toilet tank as needed)

 

(water jugs set up as a hand washing station in the bathroom...table tied to back of bath tub so as not to tip...toilet and bath faucet taped off)

At 8:30, we started the process of "everyone gets a turn to use the toilet", which is extremely far-from-normal for us...we prefer to allow the children to use the toilet as needed.

At about 8:45am, N exclaimed, "K...You're in luck! The toilet still flushes!" as K set off to use the bathroom! 

At 8:50, I received a call from the water company, "we will be turning off your water in ten minutes."

This was my cue to cover the faucets.

That was pretty much all the excitement once the children realized, "It's 9:00, and the workers don't look like they're doing anything." 

Around 9:20, R's curiosity overcame her as she asked, "Stephanie can we go out there? I want to see it!"

So she put on her boots and we grabbed our jackets. She and I headed outside while the other teachers stayed in with the rest of the children.

We examined the area, looking down into the trench just as the men put the final pipe fitting together and began shoveling some dirt over the top.

R glanced across the street and exclaimed in an awestruck voice, "WOW.......that is a BEAUTIFUL hose!" (see below) 

Yup...that's not your average garden hose!

The men from the water company told us the water was back on, so R and I went back inside to tell the others the water was on.

Upon hearing R's excitement about what she'd seen, three other groups of two asked to go see for themselves.

They all looked down in the trench to see the pipes...

but their attention was more readily attached to the roof...where the real intriguing work was now happening...

 

All in all this entire "water off" deal only lasted an hour (with mini field trips out to see the work included).

Even though we didn't need all those jugs and buckets of water, I'm thankful I was prepared for "just in case"! And no...that water did not go to waste...it added MUCH excitement to our water play in the school yard after the running water was safely running through our pipes again!