Disaster

*I started writing this back on the 18th and never posted it, maybe you'll understand when you read it. :]

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that things were a little crazy at my house and my family was staying at a hotel. Well here is what happened. Last Tuesday, the 8th, we had a little bit of a flood in our basement. When we had the water disaster people come out to assess the damage the next day, we found out it was sewage water that had leaked from our main floor drain by our furnace. It was more than just a little water. They had to come in and rip up most of the flooring down stairs, take a sample of the drywall, spray antimicrobial stuff to kill anything that might still be hanging around and then have special fans blowing for 4 days. When we got the tests back from the sample of the drywall everything was okay but a lot of the drywall had to be replaced. So after all of the special clean up was over they needed to remove our furnace to rip out some of the damaged drywall. While moving the furnace they broke it and it started leaking carbon monoxide. So while we waited for a new furnace and tried to get our insurance to pay for it, we stayed at a hotel because we didn't have heat in our home. Today they put in our newer furnace. The heat turned on at 4pm. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done. My brother and his family, they live down stairs, are still at the hotel for a couple of days. Looking back at this I have had so many blessings! The biggest one is that when the flood happened my husband was gone to work and it was his on-call week, so he didn't come home last weekend. Believe me it was hard having this mess and him no being here. But this week was much harder and because he was on-call last week he was able to be here with us until this morning when he went back. We got to swim at the hotel a few times with him. Lots of fun bonding time our children needed. Being at the hotel was hard. The only other time we've stayed at a hotel was when we were on vacation. So we thought we were, but we weren't, and I had to keep reminding myself of that. We still had to go to bed early, which didn't happen, so my oldest son could get up early and go to school. We still had errands to run, and we had to get going on choosing new carpet and flooring. If my husband hadn't have been here this week it would have been so much harder for me. He was able to take our son to school in the morning so I could stay with our other two children and let them sleep. I would have had to get them all up to take him. Today was the biggest blessing. We had a lot of stuff at the hotel. Everything from food, a crockpot, to tons of clothes, coloring books, and homework. We had to have everything packed up and checked out so we could be back at our house to let the furnace guys in at 10 am. I couldn't have done that without my husbands help. Another huge blesses was the furnace itself. Our insurance said they wouldn't pay for a new one. We don't have an extra 3 to 5 thousand dollars laying around to pay for a new one. My brother, who is a contractor, was able to pull a favor for a friend and he got us a furnace for not even a fraction of the cost that's only a couple of years old. With the insurance money we will be able to put new carpet in and new flooring in the bathroom. All of those things will look so much nicer and maybe we will be able to sell our home now. This disaster really has been a blessing in disguise and I have been carried by my Heavenly Father so far. He knows what is past, present, future, what is best for our family, and how to answer our prayers.

A leprechaun Prayer

This was too cute not to share with you. This is part of my oldest son's prayer tonight, "...bless thoughts to be put in the leprechaun's heads so they can go to Japan and give each person a gold coin so they can have help..."

Christ-like

Things have been more than just a little crazy around my house lately, more on that later. Tonight I watched my son do so many kind and unselfish things. We've been staying at a hotel just a minute from our home, again more on that later. We decided to go out as a family with my brother's family who also lives in our home and is now living in the hotel with us. They have a son just a little younger than my oldest. They have always been really good friends and at the same time close like brothers. So that means that they fight too. Well tonight there wasn't any fighting. We went to Pirate Island, a pizza place like Chuck-e-Cheese. My oldest noticed that his cousin didn't have any tokens to play the games with. I watched as he handed him half of what he had. You might not think that this was a big deal, but every year for the past 4 years my oldest asks to go to Chuck-e-Cheese for his birthday. It is his favorite place to go and we usually only go on his birthday. When he found out that Pirate Island is like Chuck-e-Cheese he has wanted to go for over a year now. His next kind act was giving his cousin some of his tickets so he could pick out a prize, not having very many of his own. His cousin was so excited to be able to get some prizes too. When we went back to the hotel my oldest noticed that he didn't have as many prizes as his siblings. He got a little upset about it. I took him in the other room and told him about his choices. I got very emotional reminding him of his kindness. As I was reminding him of that I had a precious thought come to my mind. That those acts of kindness that my son had done was exactly what the Savior would have done if He were there tonight. I told my son that as I cried and told him how proud I was of him and the righteous choices he had made. He looked me in the eye, stopped crying, gave me a hug and asked if he could go and see his cousin. When he came back I asked him what he did. He told me he had given him another one of his prizes. It's amazing what we can learn from our children.

Good Things to Come

***You'll need to turn off the music on the side. :]

I loved Elder Holland's words at the end of this message, "don't you quit, you keep trying, there is help and happiness a head. Some blessings come soon, some blessings come late.... It will be alright in the end. Trust in God, and believe in Good things to come."