Busted pipes and a dose of reality.

Today started as a normal day. I started to prep for breakfast and stepped out on the back porch to get some sausage out of the freezer. I was digging through and realized I heard something unusual...running, no more like, spewing water. My very first reaction was that my kids had left the hose running. As I walked over that way I ended up ankle deep in a mini pond that had been created from water running out from under our house. Keep in mind that not only is this the third plumbing leak in less than 6 months that we've had but this time it also falls while my husband is at school (working on his bachelor's). I mentally put on my super woman cape and attacked the siding around our house to get to the pipe which in fact was spewing all over. I found the cut-off valve and turned it to the off position all while moving like a ninja when I felt the cobwebs hitting my arms. YUCK! I was actually hoping that was a cut-off to just the one particular pipe but it in fact turned out to be the water main and turned off our whole house. So it was, from the beginning, a day of no "quality H2O" for us. I knew I would not need water for breakfast so I went on with the morning as close to normal as possible but just about an hour later. We then took the time after some morning lessons to bring as many jugs and buckets as we could find to my mother-in-law's home to "collect" water for drinking and other uses. Boy, talk about a dose of reality. How dependent we are on today's age of electricity, running water, and technology. We really are living in an era of ease. Life seems so difficult and so chaotic. Yet, we live in so much freedom. We flip a switch to have an entire room full of light at night. We don't have to find a lantern or a candle. We don't have to go to "sleep with the chickens" if we don't please to because we can actually still function at night with more than a small flame as light to guide us. We turn a faucet to endless amounts of clear (hopefully healthy) water for our every liquid need. We cook, wash our selves, clothes, dishes, floors, we serve our thirsty children. Never do we have to "fetch" a bucket or "draw" from the well. In fact most of us don't even have the worry of having to keep up an electric pump and a dug water well anymore. We're all mostly on central water these days. I can thank God indefinitely just for the one, possibly vain, reason that I do NOT have to wash two loads of clothes per day by pumping up my water and scrubbing the stains out all by hand. Have mercy! What a relief! The little things in life that we have so much faith in yet take for granted on a day to day basis are often times the things we should be the most thankful for. I often find myself worried that I spent too much time on one thing and not enough on the other. Whether school lessons, house cleaning, or loving my family something always seems to lack when the other is blossoming. 100% of Mama stretches thin on a chart of all the different "hats" we associate with our must-do lists. Today, though, I stop and realize that if I didn't have my microwave oven or Heaven forbid my laser printer (imagine having to handwrite all those birthday invitations) then I would be pulled so thin I would be weak and more vulnerable to those feelings of inadequacy. We have to remember the old saying "When you think you've got it bad just look around someone else probably has it worse." Thank God for the items, people, tools, electricity, and absolutely the RUNNING WATER that make our homes so much easier to live in.