A fun day with no school for the Boys & the day's disaster

Yesterday was Parent Teacher Conference Day at Brent.  We all went to school and I met with both boys teachers and it was good.  Then I had scheduled a tour of the Gardenia Bread Factory-they produce the bread that we buy and eat here and I had seen a sign that there was a factory on the same exit as the boys' school. 

Walking into the building alone smelled delicious!  First we watched a movie about their process of making bread.  We learned all kinds of interesting things-Greg would insert here what a nerd I was being-

-they can make 600 loaves per HOUR

-they are the leading brand of bread in the country

-the are based in Singapore

-flour is delivered to the factory in tanker trucks

-the bread pans have metal lids that are removed with magnets

-suction removes the bread itself from the pans

-automatically bagged so that no hands EVER touch the bread

-each loaf goes through a metal checker as a safety precaution before it leaves the factory

-from the factory we visited 150 trucks deliver bread daily

Sadly we weren't allowed to take pictures as we walked through this really neat glassed in catwalk where we overlooked the factory itself.  It was really neat.  I think my favorite part was watching the bags being blown open by a machine and the bread being slid into the bags.

We were able to purchase some of their specialty bread at the factory store and take a few pictures before we left.

 Ashley thought the giant piece of bread was cool-this was before we even went in to see the movie.

 This is a fake assembly line where they pose people to take their picture after the tour-of course they didn't really let us go down where the machines are running and they don't let people touch the bread!

 The kids posing with our tour guide-they allow school groups to come but no one else was there today so we got our own private tour.

 Here are the kids with a giant loaf of bread

 The factory gate

 This is a piece of the bread we bought.  It is a double delight loaf of ube (a purple yam grown in the Philippines) and cheesy twirl.  This slice is from the middle of the loaf where a single slice has both flavors.  The first slice was all purple and the last is all cheesy twirl.  They make many things out of this ube here-cakes, breads, jellys etc.  The bread really just tasted like bread to me-we'll have to conduct a blind taste test and see if we can tell the difference between purple bread and white.  They also make chocolate chip bread, which we bought a loaf of, black forest with chocolate and cherries, raisin bread, whole wheat, rolls, muffins, and little cakes-kind of like twinkies with no cream inside.

We got home about 10:30 and when I asked Ashley said that she wanted to go on to school.  So I took her to school, the boys and I had fun playing outside and went for a swim just the 3 of us and had a leftover pizza and pretzel picnic by the pool.  We left at 2:00 to pick Ashley up. 

The boys were excited because they had never been to her school before so they enjoyed their visit to The Little Apprentice Preschool.  Afterwards we went to Frutti Froyo to get frozen yogurt.  Then we went home and the day went rapidly downhill from there.

When we came in the house I smelled a strange smell and wondered if our house helper had cooked something funny???  One of the boys went to their room and came back to tell me there was water in the bathroom floor.  Sadly there was water in my bathroom floor too.  We have floor drains in all the bathrooms and the kitchen that Greg and I assumed were there to aid in cleaning.  Well apparently when 2 inches of rain falls in about 2 hours, water can come back up through those drains-the water continued to rise and overflowed the bathrooms (which are all slightly sunken) and went into the boys bedrooms, the master bedroom, the lobby off the bedrooms and the closet in that lobby.  It was a horrible mess!  Thank goodness for the maintenance and janitorial guys from Greg's office-they came, about 6 of them, and worked for hours getting rid of the water and cleaning and putting heavy things back.  My room smelled strongly of Clorox when I went to bed last night but that was certainly better than its earlier smell.  Don't you wish you lived somewhere where there was a rainy season:?  That will teach me to tell anyone that nothing bad had happened to the house while Greg was gone on his business trip!