Slice of Life – January 19th, 2017

My sister and niece are here in Kansas and I’m just about the happiest girl ever. 🙂 They flew up from Destin, Florida on Tuesday afternoon and will be hanging with us until Saturday. Five girls under one roof equals a darn good time! We found out back in November that in March they’re PCSing (moving) to Germany for a couple years, so we’re trying hard to be intentional about soaking up every minute we have together before their big adventure – hence why I’ve waited to work on this post until everyone is fast asleep in bed. 🙂

I wanted to pop in real quick to share a few pictures from the last week or so. We’re missing having Jamie around but it’s been super nice soaking up some time with my family.

Even with an ice storm on its way, my parents still made the trip up from Alabama to Kansas last Wednesday.

Things got interesting real quick when we woke up without heat on Thursday morning. It’s almost humorous how something always breaks the second our parents come to town! Jamie was off to work at 5 a.m. before he even realized the heat was out, but I put an online claim in with American Home Shield (our home warranty company) the second I woke up. I knew there was a chance my dad or Jamie could fix it, but with the weekend and a predicted crippling ice storm on the way, I knew we couldn’t take any chances.

We cleaned our air filters well and played around with a few others things to see if we could get it going, but nothing was working. We kept the fire going and tried our best to stay warm until someone could get out to look at it Friday morning. If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen that then a little miracle happened.

I have to share this story because I’m sitting here at 5 a.m. so in awe of God. 30 hours ago our heat broke. My parents and their two dogs had just arrived five hours prior after driving all day to visit us for the long weekend. Everyone tried all day yesterday to fix the heat, but I also scheduled a technician to come asap (Friday morning) to look at the system in case we couldn’t fix it. We are getting an ice storm tomorrow and didn’t want to take any chances, especially since we have two tiny kids. We couldn’t get the system to climb over 65 degrees no matter what we did, and last night it seemed to give up altogether. At 1:48 this morning I woke up frozen. I went to put extra blankets on our three-year-old and saw that the temp was 59 inside our house, which would likely drop more throughout the night (it’s 16 degrees outside). I laid back in bed and was so worried. My husband is leaving now for training, an ice storm is coming tomorrow, my parents and the dogs had just arrived, and I’m in a house with no heat with the possibility of it not being able to be fixed until next week (something the technician told me over the phone was possible). I felt so defeated, so I prayed. I prayed that God would intervene and help with this situation. I just woke up three hours later and our heat is fixed. It’s 68 degrees and warm. How is our heat working?! How is that possible in three hours it jumped nine degrees and is magically working? Maybe there’s a technical explanation, but I think God cared about our heat. I feel like He wanted to show me that He cares about all things, not just the catastrophic things that I often only pray about. I’m so grateful. “Cast all of your anxiety on Him because He cares for you.” – 1 Peter 5:7

A photo posted by Erica DeSpain (@whimsicalseptember) on Jan 13, 2017 at 3:44am PST

We still kept our appointment to have a professional look at our system, and he did identify something wrong that he was able to fix that day. He had no explanation for why the heat went up as high as it did, but we were so, so grateful to wake up to a warm home and that we were able to get it fixed professionally that day.

Later Friday afternoon I brought my parents to see our new local winery, and they loved it! Kids are welcome, and since we figured there would likely be very few people there at 3 p.m., we took the kids and hung around for about 45 minutes. We purchased a couple wines to bring home, but mainly I just wanted to show them what a beautiful spot it is! They were impressed and really enjoyed it.

This was a frequent scene. The girls ended almost every night with books and silliness on the floor with Grandma and Grandpa.

Sadie started crawling a month ago, but now she’s a little speed demon and can get into trouble in the blink of an eye. We got out our pack-n-play and have it set up ready to put her in (with a few toys) when I need to get something done and need her contained!

We did some nail painting (always Hadley’s favorite) after finding a great OPI 10-pack of mini polishes on clearance at Marshall’s.

The ice storm ended up only producing a few hours worth of freezing rain, but church was canceled, so we took advantage of watching Church of the Highlands live online, something Jamie and I have gotten really into doing when we can’t make it to our church here in town. If you’re looking to worship from home, I can’t recommend Church of the Highland’s live services enough. They’re incredible.

On Tuesday, a friend posted that our local fire station was performing routine car seat installs and checks, so I ran up there on our way home from MOPS. Not only did they make sure ours were 100% how they should be, but they were able able to correctly squeeze Sadie’s old infant seat into my Jeep for my niece to ride around in. We originally thought we’d just have to take two cars everywhere during her visit (she was going to drive Jamie’s truck), but we’re all so happy that we’re able to run around together instead of separately.

Seeing these sweet cousins together makes us so happy!

Yesterday morning we relaxed at home and let the babies get in their morning naps before running downtown to have lunch at The Chef. We drove around town for a while checking out some of Jennifer’s old favorite places before swinging by to spy on her old house. 🙂 I would kill for them to still live around here.

Jenn kept an eye on Hadley yesterday afternoon while I snuck out with Sadie for a bit for her nine-month check-up with her pediatrician. I love this wild girl!

We went for a walk before dinner to soak up the mild temperatures before kicking back the rest of the night. Jennifer surprised me with a bottle of wine once the girls were in bed and we enjoyed some good catch-up time. I’m hoping the next couple days of their visit crawl.

Today is the big 2-9 for me, so we’re looking forward to a relaxed but fun day! Cheers to my last year in my 20s…. feeling old. 🙂 Have a great day! xoxo