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.