A picture is worth 1000 words

I've spent the last year trying to capture in words the personality of my little girl; sassy, a character, funny, mischievous, etc. But honestly it's really hard to explain. Then this picture happened:

Amen!

Overwhelmed

You know that feeling when you are way behind on your blog and you are too overwhelmed to start? Then it gets worse because you keep putting it off? Yes, that is where I'm at. We've had a very interesting 2013 so far. Not necessarily in the way we would have liked. Here's the scoop.

Cormac started school. Here he is on the first day.

 After the first week he started taking the bus. He loves the bus. Which is good because it's very hard for me to send him on it. In the morning if I tell him the bus is coming before he eats breakfast he won't eat; he's too excited. So I usually get him all ready then set up a chair so he can watch out the window for the bus. Then he starts yelling, "The bus, the bus. Hurry. Run, run."

Because Cormac is in school Azure sometimes gets the bathtub for herself. She loves bathtime. When she hears that water running she gets so excited. And if you deny her that bath heaven help you.

Then it got cold. "Dirty cold" as Ammon would say. We grew some pretty impressive icicles.

Ammon and I celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary. It was lovely. We had dinner and made reservations and arrangements to stay in The Grand America (where we stayed when we were first married) for a night. It was going to be a few weeks off, but we were looking forward to a night away.

 So our start to January was really nice. Then we all got sick. First the kids got colds. Then Ammon got it. Ammon ended up with laryngitis. So he stayed home from work a few days. Just when we thought he was on the mend Saturday of that week came and both he and I were hit hard. Luckily we live in an amazing neighborhood. We have awesome neighbors who tended our kids and brought in meals. We felt so very loved. Ammon had the flu, I had body aches and a nasty cold. It was awful. That same day we noticed a serious drop in water pressure. Ammon made sure we weren't flooding in the basement, but beyond that we were too sick to do anything about it.

Sunday we were a little better. Ammon looked into it more and it turned out our water line was broken. We determined that the best course of action was to replace the entire line. Luckily we are related to some real handy folks. Ammon's brother Enoch and family came to our rescue. So we decided that Thursday we would replace the water line. We were supposed to stay at The Grand America on Friday night.

For the next 3 days it dumped insane amounts of snow on us. Thursday dawned sunny and fairly warm (at least compared to what we were dealing with). Unfortunately that meant mud. In order to connect the water line Ammon had to tear up the carpet in the living room. That's when I packed the kids in the car and went to a friend's house. I was all kinds of help.

All day Thursday Enoch drove the backhoe and Ammon hooked things up. At about 9:30 that night we had running water and a big trench. I went to turn on one of the toilets and it was not working. Turns out we didn't have cold water on that end of the house.

This used to be my front lawn.

Filling in the trench.

Anyway, the next day we decided to postpone our weekend getaway to the following week. Ammon and Enoch finished backfilling the trench and then we waved goodbye to our heroes. Thanks again Enoch Dahl's we so appreciate you. Ammon took the rest of the day off. He was so exhausted. It should be noted that there were other hiccups and things along the way. Not to mention none of us were completely healthy at this point.

That night I started throwing up. I was so thankful we weren't in a hotel. Ammon took extremely good care of me and the kids. He also managed to run a line from the laundry room to the other bathroom so we would have cold water. All was well. After 4 days of no running water we were all back up and running.

The next few days I started feeling better, at least my stomach was. But all of us still had this nasty cold. Wednesday Cormac came home from school and looked awful. And I felt awful. We went to the doctor: sinus infections for all 4 of us. Cormac had an ear infection as well. Miserable. So we postponed our weekend getaway yet again.

The next week we started feeling better. Life was looking like it may return to normal. Then we found out that our poor neighbors were having plumbing issues. And it was our fault. Apparently we had destroyed their sewer line when we dug our trench. So Ammon took Thursday off and spent the entire Valentine's Day digging a hole by hand, cleaning out the line, and repairing it. He's my hero (and he mopped my floor for me for Valentine's Day - there's no quicker way to my heart). I was worried that our weekend would be spoiled yet again, but he managed to get it all finished in time.

Friday night we had the most wonderful time. The kids stayed with our good friends and had a wonderful time as well. It was our first time leaving them and I was nervous, but it was perfect. So, for the moment we are all healthy, happy, and plumbed.

I think that we are truly blessed. Yes we have had a rough go here the last little while, but we have had so many people step in to help that it has been so humbling. We are so thankful for wonderful friends and family.

And because a blog post by me wouldn't be complete without excessive amounts of pictures of my children for your viewing pleasure allow me to present the following:

Happy playing by herself (I was happily taking pictures and avoiding the laundry that needed folding).

 Azure loves to sit in these little totes. It cracks me up. And Cormac can't resist getting in the picture if the camera comes out.

Say cheese. We are working on getting this boy to smile in pictures.

 I just adore these two. They make me so very happy. I'm a lucky mom.