I HAVE BEEN BLESSED!

I cannot even fully express how overwhelmed I am today by my blessings. Besides the awesome miracle of our actual house that was "built" today, the love of our family, friends and neighbors that was displayed all day brought me to tears more than once. We had people here excitedly watching our progress bright and early this morning and were flooded with helpers and well-wishers through out the whole day. My brother-in-law showed up at 8:30 with donuts and coffee, which went over huge with spectators and workers both. Then tonight Aunt Beth, and a dear family that joined our church this summer, the Erdvigs, totally blew me away by providing a HUGE home-cooked meal for everyone here! (Lasagna, Ziti, tossed salad, and garlic bread for almost 30 people is an unbelievable gift!) And the sweet young girls taht were here today (Kaitlyn and Heidi) even helped clean up my house (the trailer- how will we distinguish the difference in the next several weeks?, perhaps call the new house "the castle"?!)AND did my dishes (which most people who know me know that few things bless me more than doing my dishes). Speaking of gifts, my birthday was certainly not overshadowed by the house-event either - I received birthday wishes every time I turned around, and my father-in-law even had the workmen place a huge orange ribbon bow on the roof of the house for me; and friends brought a birthday cake to share this evening as well. I even got a special birthday/house day phone call from the new mommy in the hospital! Many aspects of this event were bittersweet as we knew how much my dad would've enjoyed being part of it all; but Lily was quick to point out that "Pappy has the best view" of the building.
So, emotional aspects aside - here's the details:
The set crew arrived and started unwrapping the sections at 5:15am, the crane arrived by 8, they started moving the pieces by 10 and placed the last piece right around 12, they finished all the connections and the roof and were out of here around 5pm. They'll be back to finish the siding next week. Joe and some of our guys put up the basement steps so we could all go in. We prepped the nursery and got the first coat of the first color on that room. Any cracks that appeared in the drywall from the placement were fixed. The painters tape was finished in Anna's room. Got the flooring ready for the seaming strip thingy. Electrical wiring got connected in the attic (which is huge!). And, mostly I gave people tours and fawned over my kitchen. Anyway. It's been an incredibly long day - and there are many more long days to come - so I leave off with some pictures.
*Edit - blogger is giving me some problems with uploading pictures tonight, so I'll try to add some more tomorrow! *