A moment of joy, unlikely to repeated in the near future and pray for Nicole

So as humorous as this is, my moment of joy is this: Every room in the house is clean, at the same time. In general, if I am cleaning while Todd is working, Lizzie is destroying one room while I clean another. But last night after the kids went to bed Todd helped me clean downstairs. (By the way Claire and Lizzie are consistently going to bed within 15 minutes of each other and staying asleep. Yeah!) It was nice to wake up to a clean house. And then after the kids had breakfast I was able to clean upstairs. And at this rare moment every room is clean! I am so excited and feel so together. Clutter and mess makes me crazy, but a lot of the time I just cannot do anything about it. I either do not have the time or energy to fix it. But I will enjoy my clean house even if it will probably only last a few hours. LOL. I am still trying to figure out how people with young kids keep a clean house consistently. I am sure some people are just way more diligent than I am.
Anyway on another note, we live next door to a business and for two nights in a row, Tuesday and Wednesday, the alarm system went off from 2:00 am to 5:30 am. It woke Claire up both nights and she was up, off and on, the whole time it was going off. It drove me crazy. The first night we finally called the police at 5:00 am and then it turned off at 5:30. The second night we called the police at 2:30 and again at 5:15 because it was still going off. I am sure the police were sick of us, but seriously, an alarm going off for 3 hours is annoying. Thursday I called the business and spoke to a manager and told them that the alarm going off so long was keeping our whole house up. They were very apologetic and said they had a new system and it had some kinks and I guess they thought it could be turned off remotely and apparantly they did not know it was going off so long. The manager assured me they would do something about it and it has not gone off since. That is good because one more sleepless night and I was about ready to go throw a rock through the window. I seriously wanted to give them a reason for that alarm to go off. LOL.

On a much different note I have a very good friend, Nicole, and she is experiencing some pretty serious health issues. She lost vision in one eye about 7 years ago due to a psuedo-tumor that caused some elevation in her spinal fluid. The doctors put a shunt in to help regulate her spinal fluid and up until this point it has been workig great. She recently has had some strange blackouts and her doctors just did some tests to try to figure out exactly what is going on. I talked to her the other night and was amazed by her faith. She is so calm and reassured in Christ. She has always been an amazing woman and always makes me stronger in my walk with God, but the past couple of years she has gone through a lot of junk and has always handled herself with grace and a passion for Jesus. I love her dearly and just wanted to ask people to pray for her.