St. Patrick's Day Rainbow Cupcakes + What's Been Going on in My Life

Hi everybody!!   So, I'll start by saying that I'm not sharing anything new today (unless things come together faster than I think they will) because well... my computer is temporarily out of commission.

I really don't like doing this very often, but today I'm going to recycle this old post about Rainbow Cupcakes since St. Patty's day is just around the corner... and use it as an opportunity to welcome all of my new fans and readers (Welcome if you're NEW - I've had a huge jump in new readers over the past couple of days and I'm SO happy you're here)!) and let you all know what's been going on with me.

If you're just here for the sweets, then please, please just click on over and read about the St. Patrick's Day Rainbow cupcakes and ignore the rest of this post.  Please.

But if you want to hear all the juicy and messy details about why I haven't been posting regularly... read on!  But be warned... there's whining involved 😉

That's not a very nice way to welcome new readers, now is it?  Oh well.. I'm sharing anyway.  ha!

For the past few weeks, our world has been turned upside down.  It sounds so dramatic written out like that, and in ways it was very dramatic, but now that much of it is behind us, it doesn't look quite as bad as it felt at the time.  Almost, but not totally.

The first major thing was my husband got very, very sick for a couple of weeks in late January, early February.  He was having chronic pain in his abdomen and other stomach issues that really had us terrified of what might be wrong.

He missed work for a week (that's never happened in 17+ years of marriage) we went to the ER (again, he's never been to an ER), then a specialist, then a hospital (he had never stayed in one of those either except for as a guest when I was having babies).

Ultimately he got a diagnosis and treatment and medication and it's not life-threatening (Praise the Lord!), but we were really, really scared (and not sleeping and googling it to death and convinced he had all the bad things) for a while.

In the midst of that, we had some plumbing/septic issues that starting going terribly wrong in our home.  This is a cake blog where things are pretty and sweet, so I won't go into any details, but I'll say that we had a nasty, horrible mess that involved going to the bathroom at my parents house 2 miles away and just leave it at that.

Whatever you might be imagining... it was worse than that.  Trust me. {there were tears, whining, more tears, pulling my hair out, crying... you get the idea}

We still don't have this fully resolved and won't be able to until the ground completely dries.  You see, it rained/snowed here for pretty much all of February - or at least it felt that way and this is not normal for southern Mississippi and well... my house didn't take it well.

And since the ground is super-duper muddy and saturated,  we can't begin to really fix our problems until we have dry, hard ground and can get some heavy equipment in here to do digging and repairing.  For now, things are temporarily better and we're hoping our short-term fix will hold until the ground dries.  Could you pray with me that it won't rain anymore until maybe... July?  Ha!

Next... our Excursion broke.  Since we have 6 kids and that is our only vehicle that will hold all eight of us, that was a very stressful problem to have.  And very inconvenient to not be able to travel together anywhere in just one vehicle.   In addition to the fact that we were already bleeding money for medical bills and plumbing bills... fixing our Excursion was not cheap either.  And it took not one, but TWO trips to the mechanic before it was finally running right {insert more whining}.

And then... as if everything else weren't enough, a pipe burst in our foundation.  That's right, IN our foundation - not under it.  And to make matters happier... it was the pipe that drained our kitchen sink and dishwasher.  The one where we wash dishes for a cake business and six kids.  And a cake business.  Did I mention that?

Can I just say that running a dishwasher line out of the kitchen window and washing other dishes in a bathtub (our only bathtub, by the way) or in a pot that has to be carried outside and emptied is not fun or pretty.  Not.at.all.  {whiny, whiny, whiny}

So that's that.  OH - and two more things.  They're little things ... but not really.  First, my hard drive fried on my computer for the 179,543rd time in 4 years and I had to have it replaced (which is the reason I have no photos to upload at this time).    Since I pay for Carbonite and have a backup of everything - I will be able to get all of my stuff back - it just takes several days (because I have no less than a million-zillion photos and files).  Ugh.

Also, my husband works at a nuclear power plant and this month... THIS month ( right after he got to feeling better)... when all the bad things are happening, he's working an mandatory overtime which means he's working 6 days a week, and gone 14+ hours a day.  He's not home when it's daylight. At all.  (Except on Sundays, when we have church.)

When the plumbing broke?  He wasn't home.  When the truck broke?  Not home.  When the sink pipe broke?  You guessed it!  He was not here.

Yeah.  So I won't be sad to see February gone.  And that's why my blogging has been sporadic and not all that great.

But God willing... March will be better.  I won't say that it can't get worse, because well... it can and it is for other people all the time.  But I'm holding out hope that things will start to improve, the ground will dry, and I'll have all my pics back in a few days so I can start sharing again!

So now you know... hehe.  I hope you're all doing better than I've been and I pray that March is fantastic for all of us 🙂  And for my new readers that made it through this whole post... welcome to my crazy life.  I promise my cake blog is usually much happier and sweeter than this post!!