stink, literally

Here's a few pictures to start out the post... read on for the stinky part.

Noah actually out in the snow, this is the first year he would put his feet down on it.

Look at his mischevious look, and Leah's panicked look.. priceless. That is how things go around here.

Christmas morning for us... I almost took the tree down this day even though it was only Christmas Eve to you all.

It's been awhile since our last post.. mostly just busy. The holidays have been great, lots of time with family and friends and lots of time to just enjoy being together as a family at our new home. Santa visited here one day early, then the real Christmas Eve Ben was off to work, so the kids and I packed up and went to my parents house. Santa visited us there, too.. So when we finally came back home, Noah kept asking is it Christmas again?? He was spoiled with lots of fun toys and books and treats.. isn't Christmas the best with little kids. I just love their excitement and joy!! On another note, both Noah and Leah have been fighting the yucky winter sickness.. bleck! Thankfully I have managed to stay healthy, I don't know how though... Leah gives me lots of wet sloppy kisses and Noah sneaks sips out of my drink all the time.. hm?

The big events of the week have not been good news.. First off, while Ben was staying at my sisters house in Bountiful Friday night because the snow kept him from driving home, I was up with LEah at 4am and heard some water gushing in the basement.... hm.... so, when light hit, I figured that a water main had broken out in front. The city came and dug a big hole in the front yard.. nice workers to spend their Saturday in a wet/muddy/cold hole. We were left without water for the day, but I was thankful it didn't cause too big of a mess in our basement. Luckily we have a sump pump down there for the spring runoff... at the time it wasn't connected, thus the gushing water... but not too big of a problem...

Here's a picture of the first dig..

...the problem came on Monday morning. Ben and I were just in the basement chatting about our plans for remodeling. Things were looking fine, I was even showing him where the water had been from the flood Saturday morning. We went upstairs for a minute or two, came back down and all the sudden we could see some water seeping through the closet and in the furnace room.. hm.. where is this water coming from... after following the trail, we discovered a lot more water in the bathroom... and after even more looking we could see some SEWAGE floating around.. oh man!! So I immediately called the city back and asked them if there was anything wrong with the sewage... they checked the manholes and assured me that the lines were running just fine and it must be a problem from our house to the main sewage lines.. i asked multiple times, are you sure these two incidents are not related... they felt confident that they weren't. so, after the roto rooter guy came and said that most likely the pipe had broken and it led right to the exact spot of them digging on saturday, ben and i went to the city office building and asked if they would dig again. Long story short, they came the next day, found the pipe they had hit while fixing the water.. only after we had raw sewage floating in our basement about 1 inch deep.. BLECK. they will hopefully take care of the expensive cost of the roto rooter and the ARS cleaning and things will be back to normal soon. what a mess!!... i hope you all have never experienced this. Thank goodness Ben and I had been pretty good to keep all our stuff pretty well organized and in plastic storage containers. we did have to trash some things, and there will be some sheetrock repair.. luckily we had already ripped the old carpet out and hadn't put down any new carpet yet. it could have been so much worse, but still RAW SEWAGE, so gross. Ben was so great to pretty much take care of the big cleanup on Monday.. I have a great husband. It was disgusting, and now it's all fresh and sanitized.

So, the lesson learned.. and I've learned this same lesson after the major Earthquake while living in Hawaii... keep your house in order. It sure did stink to have a sink/counter full of dirty dishes and no water to wash them. ... and I'm so grateful that we didn't have stuff just everywhere and not organized. It saved us to have our belongings in storage bins. The End.