Drips, clogs, cracks, and just plain broken!

Living in a house that is quite possibly over 100 years old, there is always something that needs repair or replacing. But leading up to the new year, it seemed that everything was breaking at once. One night I (Mike) was informed that the drain in the boy's bathtub was clogged. Upon inspection I also found out the faucet was dripping! That's not a good combination to have unless somebody wanted to stay up all night scooping buckets of water out of the bathtub. I was able to repair the leaking faucet that same night because luckily I found some replacement parts in the random-household-repair-parts-dresser. The drain would continue to be a problem for the next several days. After trying combinations of chemicals, a snake, plunger, baking soda/vinegar, and finally more chemicals, I was minutes from calling a plumber. Then it was a I decided to take one more try at the snake from a different angle and was finally successful.

In the meantime, I've been trying to re-grout our kitchen floor and replace some broken ceramic tiles. We had some old grout mixture in the garage, but that's not working so I finally bought some new stuff. So a new year was hopefully to bring less stress. Then two nights ago the unit oven stopped working. At least we have an oven in our apartment so we're now cooking in that until the replacement part arrives. In addition to that, our washer is dying a slow death and our unit van will need some better tires (if we ever get more snow). To make this all a little bit more stressful, one of our placements that we were expecting a very significant stipend from this year will most likely not be able to come through for us. They had major lay-offs and budget reductions and our stipend was eliminated.

But in the midst of what can seem like everything breaking at once, and a budget that needs adjustment, we are grateful for what we have--prayers and support from people near and far. We look forward to the rest of a great year knowing that things in our house may break but our spirits will not!

So that was Christmas

Christmas has come and gone, but before everyone was traveling for the holidays we were busy here with lots of things! It was unseasonably warm all month with only the occasional dusting of snow, so to get into the Christmas spirit, we drove a couple hours north to Wheeling for the Winter Festival of Lights. We headed up early and had a nice dinner, then drove through the resort to see all the lights. Traffic moved slowly through the resort so people could get a good look at all the displays. We tried to take some pictures, but it's not too easy while driving.

The dinosaurs were moving too.

We walked around a little too but it was pretty cold out that night so we didn't stay out too long. They had lights decorated all over the place though!












We met someone nice enough to take a group picture by the big lighted tree :)

A tunnel of lights leading to more lights.

We planned an ugly Christmas sweater party open-house for the following weekend, and of course, we had to make cookies! We had a lot of fun creating some reindeer cookies, sugar cookies, and pepper nuts. While Abby used a traditional cookbook to find recipes, Ben decided to find a less-than-detailed recipe for sugar cookies on the internet. In a picture below he is adding some baking powder about an hour after he thought he was ready to start rolling out the dough! In the end, his cookies did taste ok :)

The girls smiling like Ella

Adding a missing ingredient

The reindeer cookies

Decorating the sugar cookies

Yum!

The party was fun and a lot of our friends from church showed off their great "ugly" sweaters too. We played some games, including Twister and Foosball, and had a "How many M&Ms are in the jar contest. We even were able to get together for a few seconds to take a group picture!

Merry Christmas!

Then just before we all started going our separate ways for the holidays, we had a "secret Santa" gift exchange in the house. The kids weren't actually part of it but we let them open a present they'd bought each other :) Then off we all were for the next two weeks! Well, not all at once. There was always someone coming and going it seemed for the next two weeks. Some went home over Christmas, others over New Year's. Then we finally had our first snow storm the night before school was to start! So we're just now starting to get back into our regular routines!

Ella bought Ian R2D2

Ian bought Ella an Ariel Barbie

Renee got footie pjs to match Allison's