Historic

I would have liked to do a post much earlier, but the last few weeks have been CRAZY!  We had a birthday, home renovations, a baby with an ear infection and Roseola, and a historic storm.  We are also getting ready for company and a baptism.  There is much to do and I got little sleep while the baby was sick resulting my getting a cold sore.  The baby wanted to be held most of the time when she wasn't feeling well, which I was happy to do, but the kids were home for four and a half days due to the weather and the reduced living space of the house and the fact that I couldn't do much while holding my sick little Alice resulted in things feeling a little out of control.  My house was NOT clean.  However, as I was praying one morning about all the things that were troubling me at the moment, I had the impression that sometimes getting better means having things be worse for a while.  Literally, my home is going to be so much nicer in just a few days time.  I have finally picked out a paint color for the living room (actually Dave picked it out) and Alice is all better!  My cold sore is going away, the house is much cleaner than it was at the beginning of the week and I have still been able to exercise all week.  Emma had a wonderful birthday and I LOVED Valentine's Day.  So sweet and special.  All is well again and I am so grateful for my many blessings.  Sometimes life isn't super fun for a while, but joy is usually just around the corner if we can just hang on.  Below are some pictures of the events of the last few weeks.  Enjoy!

Emma's party was awesome!  We had a few neighbors come over for cake and ice cream since my family wasn't here.  Miss my family, but our new friends are so great.  We loved sharing Emma's special day with them!

I would call Nemo the third historic event to occur here in the East since we moved to Connecticut.  The pic with the yardstick in the top right corner was taken at the beginning of the storm.  The bottom right was taken at the end.  There was so much snow!  Dave worked all day on February 9th shoveling snow and had to rely on help from neighbors and their snow blowers just to get the driveway cleared.  Lucky for us, this just happened to be the weekend our family was assigned to clear the snow away at the church building, too.  We ended up only having Sacrament Meeting on the 10th since there were some people who were still snowed in and weren't able to make it to church.  Definitely a memorable weekend!

Here are some more photos of the house.  Emma decided to draw a mural on the wall with the paint samples.  I really am excited about the final color.  (The color we are going with is not on the walls in these photos. Stay tuned to see what the end result of our paint sampling is!)  Here I am holding my sweet Alice.  I did that a lot for a few days in a row there.  I am so relieved that she is happy and smiling again now.  Thankfully, Roseola typically only affects young children between six months and two years of age so no one else in family had to deal with it this time around.  I am sure that they all had it when they were young, too.  So nice to have this sickness behind us.  The last thing worth mentioning is the note we found under the wallpaper in the entryway.  Nice to know that Frank was here more than 50 years ago and that he got a degree!