The Cabin

The weekend before Christmas we decided to go up to the cabin with my brother and his family. We left Thursday night, later than planned of course, and made it up there at about 9:30. Mike came with us, luckily, and made the trek with Justin and Josh up to the cabin. Ali and I stayed in the warm car and waited for them to go get the snowmobile to take us up to the cabin. We all made it up there with our stuff by about 11. The kids were good, considering it was way past their bed times. We quickly set up the cribs and put the kids to sleep. Here's Brooklyn waiting for the cabin to warm up:
Friday morning we woke up and relaxed with the kids. It was fun for them to play together. Here they are playing the Wii:
Playing in the loft:Brooklyn entertaining us with her somersaults:
While I was snowmobiling with Josh and Justing, Mike took Brayden outside and showed him how to sled. We got back just in time to see him sled down the hill a few times, then make some snow angels. He LOVED it!!!
Of course we had to read our Santa story before bedtime!
Friday night about 12 of Mike's friends came up, definitely a lot more than we expected. We put the kids to bed, played some games, and tried to go to bed. Unfortunately I was not able to sleep until after 3 b/c they were very noisy. Luckily they helped with the kids in the morning so Josh and I could sleep a little longer. After a yummy french toast and hashbrown breakfast Justin and Ali left. Brayden went outside and played in the snow again before lunch. Here he is learning how to throw snowballs:
Rarely does Brooklyn snuggle. Here she is before her nap snuggling with dad:

After naps Mike and his friends cooked a big turkey dinner. We ate then got ready to go. We made it to the bottom on the snowmobiles, then while Josh was loading up the car Brayden decided to play king of the mountain with Mike. He was really cute climbing up the hill.

Here's our little family:

The kids were exhausted by the time we made it to the car. (I know, I know. We are still trying to break Brayden of his binky habit. He only has it for bed and in the car, although that will hopefully change soon...)

Ward Friend Party

We were invited over to a neighbor's house for dinner and gingerbread houses. It was fun for the kids to have other kids to play with, and we enjoyed getting to know our ward friends better.

We had some yummy soup for dinner, then started the gingerbread houses. We used melted sugar instead of frosting and it was awesome. I had seen a BYU stadium at the Festival of Trees, so we decided to give that a try. (Yes, it is the BYU/Utah game.)Here's one of the other houses being built.

Santa

We missed our ward party this year, so we weren't able to get pics w/ Santa. We didn't want to go to the mall, so we stopped in at Kid to Kid to take pics with their Santa. Brayden was in awe when he walked in and saw him. Right away he started telling him that we has been a good boy and that he wants some balls for Christmas.I probably should have eased Brooklyn into sitting on his lap, but we were in a hurry. I assumed she wouldn't be happy, and indeed she was not.

Princess Triceratops

While our pipes were frozen and we had no water I wasn't able to do any laundry. So of course we ran out of pj's. Luckily I found some of Brayden's old ones that fit Brooklyn perfectly. Each morning Brooklyn's hair looks like this from being up in a pony tail. I couldn't help but laugh when she was in Brayden's dinosaur pj's and looked just like a little triceratops:

Pipes/Christmas Party

(If you are starting with this post, you may want to skim through my last post first to fully understand the pipe issues we had.) As I mentioned in the last post I had about 8 hours worth of stuff to do in about 3 hours. Amazingly Brooklyn took a 4 hour nap and Brayden slept for 3 hours so I was able to do it all without having to worry about them. I quickly cleaned the house and started working on the pipes. I spent about half hour on the pipes and realized I needed more stuff at Home Depot. So I stopped working on the pipes and showered and got ready. Josh stopped and got what I needed on his way home. I was able to get the kids ready, the house clean, and myself ready by the time people started arriving. Now what to do about dinner?! Luckily I had made the alfredo sauce and meat sauce the night before so those were done. I solicited help from some of our friends to help Josh finish up dinner while I went outside to work on the pipes with the help of Ryan. (No, Josh is not normally in the kitchen while I am working on the house :) but b/c I spent the day with the plumber it was too hard to explain to someone what needed to get done.)

Dinner was finally ready and we all sat and had a wonderful meal. We then just hung out and talked while the kids tore the house apart. It was fun to see all the kids playing together now that they are a little older. Here are pics of dinner:
We exchanged white elephants with the kids first. It was fun to see them all have something new to play with.

Of course we forgot to take a picture of the kids before we put some of them in pj's, but we did manage to get a picture. (Yes, that is Brooklyn wearing Brayden's old dinosaur jammies with a purple bow in her hair. Without water for two days I couldn't do any laundry and we were completely out of any of her clothes she could use as pj's.) The first picture is of the kids at last year's Christmas party. It's fun to see how much they have all grown.

I couldn't believe we ended up taking the picture with the kids all sitting in the same spot as last year, with the new addition of course. We then exchanged white elephants with the adults. Andrew ended up with the black widow Josh has been keeping in a jar for about 3 months. Here he is when he realized what he had opened:Adam showed up at the end of the white elephants, so Andrew wrapped the spider back up and gave it to Adam. Adam didn't appreciate it. He ended up putting it in the box by the front door. Later that night Josh and I were wondering what happened to the spider, assuming that Andrew and Adam hid it somewhere in our house. So we texted them and found out about Adam putting it in the box. Well...that box ended up being the Tuckers. They found it when they got home and unloaded their stuff. Needless to say, they left it on their porch overnight so they could go throw it in a dumpster the next day.

The party ended up being a lot of fun and went really well. After everyone left Josh and I returned to the pipes and spent about 1 1/2 hours finishing up the insulation while it was about 7 degrees outside. We let the water run in all our pipes until the lows were back into the 20's. Tyler from our ward is going to help us solve the problem in a few weeks after Christmas. We are SO grateful for wonderful ward members that are willing to help us out eventhough we don't know them well yet.

Frozen Pipes = Flooded Basement

What a week we had! December 3 we noticed that the cold water in our kitchen stopped working. Talking to my dad we decided the pipes had frozen. So I spent an hour with the blow dryer trying to thaw them out, which ended up working. Yeah! My dad spent a couple hours on Saturday helping us find the source of the problem, which was this--The genius who built our house didn't insulate any of the pipes that were in the overhang of our house. So it was pretty much pipes, a piece of wood, then 2 degree air. N-e way, we insulated the pipes and hoped we had fixed the problem.

Tuesday night, the 8th, Josh and I were on our way to bed when we realized again that the water had stopped in the kitchen. We were up until 3am trying to defrost the pipes with the hair dryer, which didn't work. So we went to bed after turning the water off in case of a burst pipe. We woke up to no water in our entire house! What?! We went to the neighbors to get some buckets of water and they gave us a phone number of someone in the ward that could probably help us. He, Tyler, came over after work around 7. After surveying everything he called and lined up his plumber to come help us the next morning. Great. Still no water.

Thursday came and the plumber showed up at 7:30. Tyler came over as well and after 2 hours were able to determine where the pipes had frozen by punching some holes in our sheetrock. They hooked up a huge heater fan and built a tent on the back of our house to warm up all the pipes. Here are pictures of the tent and heater.

Tyler left while the plumber and I waited for the pipes to thaw out. One by one our water was turning on. We were down to one last pipe that went to the kitchen hot water. The plumber asked me to run downstairs to see if starting the dryer would help heat things up. As I got to the laundry room I heard a waterfall and saw water coming in everywhere. The plumber quickly turned the water off as we determined that the last pipe obviously thawed out and had burst. Fantastic. Luckily all the water was contained to the bathroom and laundry room so I could quickly sweep it down the drain.

The plumber started looking for the burst pipe. We ended up making a mess of our ceiling before finally finding it. (After Tyler saw what he did and knowing it was NOT necessary to do that to our ceiling b/c of how it was built, he was very angry at his plumber. Tyler and his brother are going to fix it for us to make up for that mistake of the plumber.)

Here's where he finally found the burst pipe:Within about 30 minutes he had the pipe replaced and the water was finally on for good! The only problem was that our house still didn't have any protection for our pipes since the geniuses who built the house put all the water pipes tightly against the cement of our house, so not only do we have a problem with the pipes in the overhang freezing, we have potential problems with all the pipes along the wall. No one had this problem before us b/c the basement was unfinished so there was warmer air inside to counteract the cold cement.

So the plumber left about 2:45 and you would like all would be well. Unfortunately, that only gave me about 3 hours to get the house ready for our friend Christmas party we were hosting at 6. I had to clean the house, set up all the tables, shower and get ready, bathe the kids and get them ready, and I had about 2 hours worth of work to do on the pipes to insulate them. Hmmm...not going to happen. To be continued in the next post...

BYU Game

Josh took Brayden to his first BYU basketball game. Football games are a little long for him, but the basketball games are perfect. He loved every minute of it! (Although Josh had to keep reminding him that Deron, AK, Memo, and Ronnie weren't playing.) Here are a few pictures of my BYU Boys!

Brayden was very excited he got a BYU stamp. He wouldn't stop talking about it when they got home, and the next day, and the next. (Pretty much everyday until the stamp wore off.)