Necessity is the Mother of Invention

There's never a dull moment when you have a 60 year old house. We've noticed for the past 1-2 months that our house was smelling funky (or like farts as Carrie kindly put it), and have been cleaning like mad to get rid of the stench but to no avail. Finally I opened up our crawl space and ack! There was water all over the ground. Dan was able to discover the culprit: a leaky drain pipe from our sink. It had completely rusted out and was pouring water under our house. Yadi, yadi, yada... 10 hours later we have a working pipe again and can FINALLY close the windows and run the heat again.

We felt so blessed that Dan was able to fix it himself. Last year we had a $4K plumbing emergency that just about killed us so we were really gun-shy about calling a plumber. Yay for Dan! He truly is da man!

During Spring Break Ella & I went to the Living Planet Aquarium with her posse.

Great times!

Ella loves, loves, loves to play the part of big sister to anyone who'll let her, or not.

Milli Vanilli--the next generation

On a more serious note... This past week I was able to be with my sister, Jo, during her delivery. It was a really amazing experience to once again witness a baby being born. Jo was really brave and did so well especially when we discovered the baby was in distress and needed to get out ASAP. Most of all I'm proud of her for doing the hardest thing of all: giving her baby up for adoption. I cannot even imagine how difficult that was to do especially after spending two days with baby Noah in the hospital. But I really am inspired by the love and clarity she called upon to do such a wonderful thing: giving the gift of family to a couple who is unable to have children of their own. Being a reproductively challenged couple ourselves we definitely know what a blessing and tender mercy it is to have a child in the home. I am so proud of the loving sacrifice that Jo made for Noah and for his adoptive parents. And what a wonder it is that through the atonement of Jesus Christ we can experience healing and comfort even in the most unfortunate of circumstances. We're praying for you, Jo, and love you lots.