On the ELEVENTH day of Christmas

We went over to Nana's house! Nana took the kids to Target to buy candy canes and lights for her "kid tree", so that I would have time to make some important phone calls to get the water thing figured out. So nice. She then let the kids help decorate her tree, and set up the train under it, and we watched the Mickey Christmas cartoon. And she shared her personal experiences with me of how she has felt the true spirit of Christ this season.

I called our builder, Cade, to ask for some names of excavators he might refer me to. He said he'd just come check it out, and offered to dig it out if his backhoe bucket would fit in the trench (our house is built on solid rock) to save us some money. Very nice of him. Well, to make a long story short, he basically spent his whole day at our house, trying to figure things out for us, and he was able to get inside and found out that the pipe was actually frozen in our utility room! I was completely embarrassed, but he was very nice about it and thawed it out and got things working for us. Wow, what a nice thing for a stranger to do! That's the Christmas spirit in action, for sure! And we're so grateful that it didn't turn into some huge, expensive project.

My mom very kindly offered to take the kids for us so Jon and I could go on a Christmas shopping date. It was especially nice, since we'd already slept at her place 2 nights, and that would make it one more. Thank you, Mom! We got pretty much all the shopping done for the kids (sooo exciting!).