April showers bring May flowers...March snowfalls bring...leaky roofs

Being a homeowner is a great blessing. Being a homeowner of a 30+ year old home however sometimes brings about great distress. All winter long, our sturdy little old home gave us no trouble. And then we had to have just ONE more snowstorm in the midst of beautiful spring weather...and now my house appears to be falling apart. Leaky roof = wet walls, wet carpet = people coming into my home ripping up my carpet, cutting holes in my walls = insurance claims, insurance deductibles = one giant mess. We made it through the entire winter...why must this happen now??

At least I have one great story to come of all this. It has to do with my sweet daughter and teaching her a lesson...or so we thought. After a series of holes, leaks, ruined carpet, insurance adjusters and disaster clean-up bids, I thought we were on our way to getting this mess taken care of. And then yesterday, on a completely different wall on a completely different area of the house, I noticed another soft looking, baseball sized spot on the wall. I gently pressed my finger on it to see if it was wet...Yes, it was soft and surely wet on the inside. Great. My husband came home, I showed this new impending disturbance to him, and we left the room to make another round of phone calls.

Well, we came back to look at the wall and noticed a perfect little four-year-old finger sized hole right through the wet spot. Jaron angrily called Liv into the room and asked her if she had done this, and in tears she admitted that yes, she had, and was then sent to her room for time out. A few minutes later, Jaron went into Liv's room to talk to her about what she had done. He found her behind the rocking chair in her room with a notepad and some markers. He asked her what she was doing and she looked at him in tears and handed him the paper she had been drawing on. She had drawn a picture of our family with water leaking down on us from the top of the page. Underneath our family she had written in her four-year-old handwriting..."I sori." Jaron scooped her up in his arms and brought her and the notepad into me to read. We gave her huge hugs and told her how much we loved it and how proud of her we were.

Yes, we were surprised that she could actually sound out the word "sorry" and write it down on paper at age 4, but we were even more surprised and proud about her huge heart and ability to understand what she had done. We thought we were teaching her a lesson, but it was Livia who taught us a lesson! We hardly ever have to get mad at her...she rarely gets into trouble and when she does, she immediately feels bad about it (as you can see)! I love her so much...Here are some fun pictures that help tell the story: