November: Beauclair Visit and Birthday Party

After our Quartz Mountain trip, we got to stay put while visitors came to us: Grandma, Grandpa, and Uncle Greg. They came right before Blaise's 3rd birthday, so we celebrated with an early birthday party. I was crazy excited to have family to celebrate with because for his second birthday, it was lonely. I know he had fun, but there's something about having the whole house decorated with a birthday meal prepared and a cake waiting to be devoured that begs for family to be there.

Again, because I'm back blogging, I have no recollection of what we did in the days leading up to the party. Pictures tell me there was a lot of reading going on and general free time play.

Reading with Grandma Sharon and getting help dressed from Uncle Greg.

I am so not creative when it comes to decorating for parties. The use of construction tape as streamers was about as clever as it got.

We had meatball sandwiches for supper. I made a "dirt" cake with chocolate cake and ice cream filling. Blaise was thrilled to see the dump truck with real dirt in it and even more thrilled that he got to dump the dirt out and eat it.

By the looks of things, Zélie had one too many Coronas.

Blaise hit the jackpot with his birthday present: a homemade Mass kit complete with handmade vestments. He was in love the instant he opened the first package.

Zélie had to have her turn, too.

The Mass kit Grandma Sharon pieced together was amazing! Battery powered candles, a chalice polished up by Grandpa, a little bell, a patent, hosts, altar cloths, all complete with his own box to put it in.

  We hung the vestments on the bottom bar in our closet, so he could easily reach them, and stored the Mass kit box on a shelf in our closet, too. We told him the closet was his Sacristy. Blaise was so insanely excited about his new Mass kit that he got up in the middle of the night to check on it. He came into our room, turned on the closet light, and satisfied that it was still there - safe and sound - let us put him back to bed. You'd better believe he was up when Aaron's alarm went off that morning ready to vest and say Mass.

7AM Mass with Father Beauclair

I think this was the same morning that we got to Skype with Naomi. She is doing a two year mission trip with Heart's Home in Thailand. This was the first time since she left in August that anyone had been able to talk to her via Skype. It was great to be able to see her, hear about how radically different life is in Thailand, and listen to how she's serving the people over there. We got to talk for a couple of hours.

Please note that our desk is pulled away from the wall. This is because of a slight fiasco we had with the plumbing. On Saturday morning we realized that the bathtubs weren't draining and that we had overflow in our garage. Awesome. The plumber came that afternoon (and charged us an arm and a leg simply because it was the weekend - I have yet to let this go) and cleaned out the main pipe. Problem solved.

Not quite.

That night I was doing Blaise's bedtime routine with him while Aaron put Zélie to sleep. Blaise chose to go to the bathroom in our bathroom. As soon as he finished peeing, a bubble came up from the toilet. "A bubble, Mom!" Blaise commented. "Uh, huh," I said, more concerned with continuing the bedtime routine. We flushed the toilet and found ourselves with a toilet full of water pouring onto the floor and not stopping. I ran to get Aaron, took over Zélie duty, and hoped for the best with the toilet situation. From Zélie's room, I could hear the scampering of Blaise's feet as he ran back and forth between the towel closet and our bathroom. I later found out that Aaron had instructed him to grab every towel he could...and an eager Blaise started with the washcloths. :)

I then heard Blaise run into the living room and proclaim to the rest of the crew that the toilet was overflowing. I finished putting Zélie to sleep and came out to find my in-laws mopping up toilet water that had seeped through the carpet into our closet and bedroom. God bless them. By this point, I was so frustrated I just wanted to cry, but everyone else's good spirits reminded me that these things do happen and there is absolutely nothing I could do about it other than grab a towel and start blotting. How grateful I was that Aaron and I didn't have to handle it alone.

I have no idea how we solved the toilet problem...lots of plunging to remove whatever was in there? Regardless, the toilet saga wasn't over yet, but you'll have to stay tune until we catch up to January to hear (to be read with Paul Harvey's voice here) the rest of the story.