I guess these are my latest excuses...

Lots to say, very few minutes to say it in...

We have been crazy busy for quite some time now. I'll start by telling you that we still haven't put our christmas cards in the mail. We were slackers and got our photos done too close to Chrismas then our computer died completely (it had our mailing list with addressess on it.) Aaron fixed said computer Jan 8th or 9th but by then our plumbing problems were just starting.

To be brief, after many days of super slow kitchen sink drainage the main sewer line clogged so bad that sewer began to spew from a pipe into our laundry room! The stink and mess were awful. Luckily, 2 wonderful women in our ward called to help out. One let me wash all the sewer laundry at her house and the other came over with a super duper steam cleaner that removed all traces of the sewer water. They both top my "respect" list (like Carolyn and Leslie for scrubbing my bathrooms when I was 7 months pregnant.) The plumber came, took out the toilet and ran 100 feet of roto-rooter line down into the pipes. He fixed it and left the place pretty clean afterwards.

A few days later, just as I was finishing the rest of the backed up laundry and dishes our heater began some seriously crazy mini explosions when starting up. Sometimes the whole house would shake and we would get quite scared. It took a while to get a heater man out to fix it 'cuz it was during the crazy low temperatures that Aaron posted about. He was scheduled to come many times but had to to reschedule because he had true emergencies to deal with (people without heat at all.) When he finally came he cleaned out the heater but the explosions were worse! Ian happened to be standing in front of the heater when yellow flames exploded out of the heater grate! Luckily, he didn't get burned. We opted to turn the heater off completely and use space heaters until the next day when the heater man returned with a longer cleaning tool. That did the trick. He said there must have been a small spider web inside. Crazy.

The next week on Wednesday I fell down the stairs while carrying Ian. We were super lucky. Ian landed hard on his bottom on a step and I slid on my backside down to the bottom. I reached my arms back and bore most of the impact on the back of my forearms and on my lower back. I had bruises on my arms and lower back but I consider us SUPER lucky since I didn't bang my big pregnant belly and Ian didn't land on his head!

Two days later I took the kids sledding. I only went down a small hill one time with Ian but my back just wouldn't function after that. Aaron can attest to the fact that my back has gotten in the way of almost all housework functions. It has been 1 week with us living this way. I am currently icing it now. Thank you, Aaron, for all that you have been doing!