The Saga of the Washing Machine

The Saga of the Washing Machine

Day 1, Saturday: We arrive in Alice and plan to get some laundry done. This is suddenly bumped up in priority when Koa throws up all over his clothing and socks and our kitchen floor. Brice turns on the faucet to let hot water into our washing machine, and it spray/leaks. So he turns it off. We try the cold water. Nothing. Happily, we also have a laundry room sink, so Brice does a bit of handwashing. Using our mop handle as an agitator. Because barf laundry is gross.

Day 2, Sunday: We take the day off from worrying about laundry.

Day 3, Monday: I call maintenance. They say they’ll send someone on Tuesday.

Day 4, Tuesday: At 5:05 pm, I suddenly realize no one has come. I call, and the office is closed.

Day 5, Wednesday: I call maintenance first thing. The plumber comes a few hours later and fixes the leaky hot water, makes sure the cold is working, and leaves me to start my laundry.

I get two loads of laundry done before I realize something odd: The “warm” load is steaming hot (literally). The “cold” load is steaming hot (still literally). When I turn off the hot faucet to try to force cold, we get no water at all.

Day 6, Thursday: I am now on a first-name basis with Sharon, the maintenance office lady. She’s very nice, by the way, very friendly. I let her know about the “cold” laundry, and she sends out the plumber again. I’m pretty sure they’re thinking, “Stupid Americans can’t turn the faucets the right way.”

The plumber comes. It turns out that, at least in this case, I am not a stupid American. Sure, the cold water hose works, but it still doesn’t come into the washer. The plumber informs me I need the actual machine serviced, not just the plumbing.

Sharon calls to schedule a new machine to be delivered to me on Friday.

Day 7, Friday: The switch-out is incredibly fast. We’re talking less than ten minutes. One machine out, one machine in, done. While the nice service guy is finishing up, Ammon comes to talk to him, informing him that he let a bee in the open door. The man chats with Ammon, pointing out that without bees, we’d have no honey and no flowers. Ammon then tells him that if there was no honey, the bears would start breaking into the human houses to try to get all our stores of honey. This is all very important because Ammon is adorable and distracting.

I start up a load of laundry before he leaves, to make sure it’s working. Hooray! We have cold water! The maintenance guy leaves, and Ammon and I hang out in the living room while the other kids play in the spare room. Ten, maybe twenty minutes pass.

Ammon gets up to walk through the kitchen (which is connected to the laundry room) to join his siblings. There is a strange, sloshing sound.

The whole kitchen and dining room floor is flooded.

I call Sharon. Hysterical laughter.

The maintenance fellow and his partner are back again to help us clean up the mess. (Oh, I’m so glad they came to help clean it up because it would have taken hours with just me and the kids and our towels and wimpy mop.) It turns out that Ammon was so charming with his deep thoughts about bears and honey that the maintenance guy forgot to connect the drainage hose to the sink. He is abjectly apologetic. I can only laugh. These things happen, after all.

Day 7, later. I do several more loads of laundry. Everything works. The dryer is kind of wimpy, but who really cares at this point? We have clean clothing! More than we even have hangers for! We sigh happily.

The End

Week #1 Review

No, don’t go thinking anything crazy like, “Hey, it’s the beginning of the new year! Jeanna’s probably going through (yet another) New Year’s Resolution about being more up-to-date on her blog.” Nope, I have stopped making those resolutions altogether. They never end well.

So this is not me turning over some brilliant new leaf and suddenly updating our family blog on a regular basis. This is just an unexpected few moments of me documenting things. And now that the explanation is over, here we go, (drum roll please), the first week of the new year!

1. We have slowly been starting back into regular life, complete with all of the regularly scheduled stuff. Ugh. (But at least co-op got canceled so we didn’t have to do that on Thursday!)

2. I finished copyedits for a project I’m involved in—and I was only a day late! So be impressed. Plus, in case I haven’t mentioned it yet, I’m so excited for this one. Stay tuned for more (ha! like that’s gonna happen!), but just know for now it involves what happens after the fairy tales end! Plus, it involves some people I adore and some stories I love. So pretty much it’s amazing.

3. I cut Addra’s hair again. I want to say something cool about why, but the truth is more like this: 

Me: Your hair is snarly. We have to brush it.  (For maybe the second time the whole week.)

Addra: *cringing the whole time*

Me: We could cut it short again so it doesn’t tangle as much.

Addra: Yes yes yes! 

So it’s pretty much about laziness and pain avoidance. Fortunately, the short style actually really suits her, and she was so so so happy to see how it turned out. I’m still completely muddling through it and making it up as I go along (when in doubt, point cut it some more!), so I’m very happy she liked it too. 

4. Brice was in Utah for a work conference. I love that he gets to go occasionally and spend some time with his sibs, cousin, and parents. He gets to learn work stuff and also get a little parenting vacation. Sure, we miss him, but we also order pizza a lot, so it works out. 

5. We put off Three Kings Day so we could celebrate it with Brice. I’m still not sure what the camels are bringing, though. Man, present shopping is hard.

6. Our friends the Ledbetters are moving away, so we watched their kids for a bit this week while they packed. The first thing their 1.5yo does when she comes over is put on a dress. It makes me laugh. We will miss their family.

7. Slowly but surely our house is going back together after the painting and ceiling fixing from November. This week I put up one of the four sets of curtains I need to! (Granted, I meant to do all four, but household projects are always harder than you think they’ll be. And in some cases, so is drywall.)

8. I discovered that it is indeed really painful to have things shoved under your fingernails! A quite large splinter made its way, suddenly and forcefully, halfway down my fingernail recently. It felt awesome. (This was technically not this week, but I still had to share.)

9. New Year’s came and went. We didn’t even try to stay up late. We are such partiers! I may one day post some comments about resolutions and words of the year, but don’t hold your breath for it.

And now for the obligatory picture dump!

See the red mark? That's how far the splinter went down. Ouch.

Dressed as a princess

Ammon is the prince who is supposed to be hugging her.

Awwww, the hug.

This boy loves having his picture taken!

They stuffed his pajamas full of toy food, which is why he looks all lumpy.
Also, he too loves having his picture taken, but he seems to think that it should always be a super goofy expression. This is the expression he made on purpose for this picture.

Joining in the fun of stuffing toy food down his clothing.

Part 1 of my delightful surprise when I came out of my room one day.

Part 2. At least he put them back in the package?

Addra's haircut and happiness!

Seriously. This is the expression he WANTED in this picture!

See?!?

More ridiculous cuteness. He needed a pic of his fancy hair.

How the baby eats sushi.

What my fingernail looks like now, two-ish weeks later (doesn't hurt anymore though).

Squirrel Antics

We have a bird feeder that the squirrels had started getting to, so we moved it higher up the window in the hopes that no squirrels would be able to find a way to reach it anymore. Then, a couple days ago, I heard a thud, so I ran out to the kitchen to see what had happened. This is what I saw. (The bird feeder itself had been knocked to the ground.)

The poor squirrel was breathing hard and clearly freaking out, thinking, "Why do I always get myself into these messes? What am I going to do now?"

 

A minute later, his last claw slipped, and he fell some more. This time, oh joy, he caught himself by sinking all his toes into the formerly lovely mesh of our screen window. But again, he was stuck. Another few moments, and he slipped and fell the last few feet to the ground. Obviously he wasn't hurt, but I sure hope it teaches him to avoid our bird feeder from now on!

Scattered Thoughts

I’ve started avoiding blogging again because I only have little bits and pieces to tell, not any sort of coherent narrative of really anything. But that means stuff is piling up, so we’re doing another random pile o’ junk post. (Also, I started this a week ago, so it’s all old news, but I’m not going to try to fix any weird verb tenses or time references. Ptui.)

Major Minor Miracle. Yes, I know “major minor” doesn’t make sense, but here’s the thing: it was a total miracle to me, and really huge for that particular moment in my life, but it’s also ridiculously small. Yesterday I was so stressed out over preparing for our co-op’s class fair that is happening tomorrow. I had a list of performances on a sheet of paper, and I needed it so I could type up the programs for the fair, but I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. I’ve been on high stress about this activity for a while now, and this was the last straw. As I searched, I prayed—please, please help me find it. I looked in every spot I could think of that it could have possibly ended up, and I finally hit the last spot—the car—and it wasn’t there.

I came back inside the house feeling utterly defeated and on the verge of tears. Again I prayed. Please. Then my eyes wandered over to our fireplace mantle, where our family yearbooks are lined up, and there was the paper, sitting with the yearbooks. Exactly where I had put it and completely forgotten it almost a week ago. I was so grateful.

Koa the Earthling. This just barely happened—Koa walked out into the living room with a box on his head. He told Brice he was an earthling.

The Anthology! My latest gigantic and insane project is finally finished and printed and distributed! I’m enormously proud of it. It’s a collection of stories written by the teens in the writing class I’ve been teaching at co-op this last year. I’ll be posting more about it on my other blog soon and I’ll link there if I can remember. But let it just be said that it was a large undertaking and I am so thrilled to be done (but also thrilled to have done it).

Short Fiction. Speaking of writing, I have been returning to short fiction a lot lately and really enjoying it. It’s been so much fun, and I think I’m going to spend more time in short fiction for the next little while. I have several places I’d like to submit things to, so we’ll see.

Mormon Lit Blitz. Also speaking of short fiction, go look here! Pay particular attention to the entry for June 10th.

Mother’s Day. Brice is so wonderful. He made Mother’s Day quite lovely, as he always does. This year he made me a delicious breakfast frittata and said, “Fri-tada!” Complete with a “tada” gesture. It was pretty great, but it doesn’t translate on paper very well. Also, he bought me a lock-picking set! Yay! Now I can start learning a new skill. It comes with a see-through lock, which is pretty cool because then you can actually see the mechanisms, which I’ve never really understood before.

I love this about Brice—he is always supportive of my whims and desires to expand my learning, even when it’s silly.

Compliments. Okay, this is probably weird, but I keep two compliment files—one is informal, in my memory, and the other is actually in a file in my email. The email file is where I put emails or facebook messages or other communications that people sent me that were really touching and made me feel all glowy and happy. I get to go back and refer to it occasionally when I’m feeling particularly crappy. The other file is my internal list of the weirdest/funniest compliments I’ve ever received.

This last week, I got to add two potential compliments to the weird file.

1. As part of our class wrap-up, I was asking the teens what their future plans were with writing. Many mentioned how they felt about the class (overall positive), but this was my favorite: “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

2. Driving home from church on Mother’s Day, Brice and I were talking about how our various parenting abilities had improved since the beginnings. I mentioned that I was much better with small children than I used to be (though still not very good), and he replied that he thought I was “pretty decent.” Which was both honest and amusing, given that he said it on the day we’re supposedly telling all the mothers how incredibly awesome they are. But actually, “pretty decent” felt like a pretty great compliment. It was real and completely believable (not like “you’re the best with babies!” which would just be a lie).

Must update photo! Holy crumbs, I just looked at the photo that’s on our blog header, and we are two babies behind. Yikes. I really need to fix that. Someday...

The end. Oh so many times in the past little while I’ve thought of something to add to a blog post, but I never do remember them long enough to add. So we’ll just end here.

Eating Glue, and so on

I managed to make it through 36 years of life without ever eating glue. Up until yesterday. Yesterday I was sitting at the table with my kids, cleaning up our lunch dishes at co-op. I moved a lid and felt something wet on my hand. It was a little white smear. They'd eaten go-gurts earlier, so I thought nothing of it and just licked it off.

Not yogurt.

The 6yo had a class project sitting next to our dishes, and the class project had huge globs of wet glue. Which is, of course, what I'd just eaten.

In case you're wondering, it was gross. Not the worst thing I've ever eaten (that would be horseradish), but I'd definitely never eat it on purpose. I had to eat an orange slice and a big bite of cake to try to get rid of the flavor, and even then it felt like it was sticking to my tongue. (Sticking. Har har.)

So, there's that item off my bucket list.


In other news, the 2yo is currently even more crazy about reading than his sisters. Yesterday morning he woke up around 5:30 wailing, "Read a book!" Which was pretty much how he'd fallen asleep the night before too.

Also, we were playing with wiki sticks earlier in the week, and I made the letters for the 6yo's name, so the 2yo wanted me to do it for him too. I did, and I spelled out his name while pointing at the letters. It was fun, and then he started jumbling them around and picking up each letter and saying it was his name. Good golly, 2yos are cute.

The next day while I was showering he toddled in (I have got to start locking that door!) holding a bunch of wiki sticks in his hands and saying, "Letters!" Also ridiculously cute. But you probably had to be there to understand.

On second thought, you shouldn't be there. Because I was showering and all.


Now for a teaser: Soon I hope to regale you with tales of our trip to Londontown and my giddy jumping-up-and-down excitement over getting to use a drop spindle. It was good times!

Also, maybe I'll get around to updates on my teen writing class and our epic anthology!

First things first, snowman confusion, fashion

The very first thing Koa said to me this morning when he came out of his room: "Read this book?" He is totally my child.


Today he was looking at an old picture of Brice with a snowman. When looking at any picture, photo or illustration, he is constantly pointing and saying, "What's this?" Or, "This is?"
So he pointed to Brice and said, "This is?"
I told him it was Daddy, and he said, "No." Then he pointed to the snowman. "This Daddy." He was quite adamant.


Addra designed some fantastic dressed today. She is quite the fashionista.


Coriel has been writing some epic stuff lately. I'll try to post some soon. It's pretty great.

Sleeping Like Tree Trunks

The other morning, Coriel and I were sitting on the couch talking about how we’d slept. I asked her if she had slept like a log, which she found confusing. So of course I had to explain the idiom, along with “slept like a baby,” which we both agreed was not an appropriate metaphor for deep, restful sleep. In fact, according to her, both of these idioms were weird. After all, logs don’t sleep. 

“How do you know?” I said. “Maybe they’re always asleep. Maybe you’ve never seen a log that’s awake. Maybe they dance around when they’re awake.”

We then went on to discuss tree trunks. I was certain that they are also always asleep.

“No. Tree trunks are awake,” she declared. “You’ve never seen a tree trunk that’s asleep.”

“How do you know?”

“When trees are asleep, they snore really loudly, like a police siren and a car crash put together.”

And now you know.

Meat

Scene: The airport, where I am dropping off the hubby for a short business trip. I am attempting to not act like a total basket case because I am, of course, a mature, responsible woman capable of watching her own three children by herself for four days.

ME: [smiling] Have lots of fun in Utah!

HUBBY: Okay.

ME: [still smiling] Have fun playing with your sister and your parents.

HUBBY: [nods]

ME: [still smiling] And get some dinner from Epic!*

HUBBY: [enthusiastically] Or maybe some churrasceria!**

ME: [bursts into somewhat hysterical tears]***

HUBBY: [a little stunned by my reaction] Oh, I’m sorry. Order some Outback while I’m gone, okay?

ME: [nodding pathetically] Yeah, okay.

Scene: Twenty minutes later, at the drive-thru at Wendy’s, I am ordering a burger. It’s not churrasco, but at least it’s meat.****

* One of our favorite restaurants in Salt Lake.

** Brazilian barbecue, where they come around to the tables with giant skewers of meat, meat, and more meat.

*** There is no logical reason why the idea of Brice eating churrasco caused such hysteria. But it did make me realize how much I miss semi-inexpensive churrasco. The only churrasceria in the area that we know of is a snooty, high-falutin,’ $50-per-plate one in Baltimore. That is not happening.

**** Theoretically.