Hello friends and family. It has been a long 4 weeks since the last dispatch. Our house was visited by chicken pox which lasted TWO AND A HALF WEEKS. I tried to make things "fun" for the kids while they were sick but  was a bit too enthusiastic about it. Emma corrected me though. I was getting some tea party together or something, babbling about what fun we could have at home when she cut in with a wail: "Why are you trying to have fun when I am sick! It's not FAIR!"  So we spent the rest of the day like this:

After a few days we got ourselves together and did some fun stuff.

We actually spent almost a whole morning doing colour expirements with salt and food colouring then pouring it into layers in jars,  making bean flour cookies (ran out of regular stuff) and geting crafty.

Meanwhile, we had been chasing a leak around the house. There has been an occasional stream of water appearing in the basement and we couldn't figure it out. Was it the thick dam of ice on the roof melting and geting in the house somehow? There was no choice but to open up the walls and check it out. Hello Saws all!

found the leak!

 After cutting various holes in the wall upstairs and down, we found it. Turned out to be a punctured a water pipe. Happened when Daddy and cousin Ben put in wood floors upstairs. Could happen to anyone (heh heh). The leak had been intermitten because we heat with a wood stove mostly. There you go. But wielding a saws all can be dangerously addictive. Once you start you just want to keep going. I needed to talk myself down. Then we got a plumber and now we have no leak, but we do have a great assortment of holes.