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

I Know You Didn’t Mean It, But ...

Cuter than feral goats.

Look, before I tell you some very honest and sticky feelings, let me start by saying it’s not your fault. If you’ve said these things to me, I’m not mad at you or offended or anything. I probably don’t remember it was you! 

But let me add that I’d love it if you wouldn’t say it in the future. I’ll still love you if you do, but just so you know, you’re going to send me home bawling my eyes out. 

Okay, so what is it that you may or may not have said? You said, “Sure, this stage of parenting, with littles and all, is hard. But when they’re older, it just gets different hard (or even harder!). The worries are different, but at least as bad (or worse).”

Now, I understand you meant to be comforting but also realistic. You wanted to remind me that I won’t always have to be watching my baby to make sure he doesn’t fall off of whatever precarious place he’s climbed onto and crack his head open. You’re reminding me that diapers will one day be a thing of the past. Someday soon I won’t feel like a Sherpa with baby on one hip, three bags on the other, holding a toddler’s hand, and climbing up and down the co-op’s stairs (so many stairs!). I get that’s what you’re trying to do. 

But this is what I hear: “You will never ever get a break. There will never be a moment when you get to relax and feel like you’ve accomplished something good. You will never feel good about parenting. Every time you start doing something well, things will just get worse. You think you’re struggling now? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

This is what it feels like: Imagine a person drowning in the ocean, seeing the shore from a distance too far to reach. She’s sputtering and splashing and terrified and hoping she can somehow make it to the sand so she can just breathe air for a minute or two.

And you tell her, “Sure, that’s nice. But when you get to shore, there are hordes of hungry man-eating goats all over the beach. They’ll take longer to kill you than drowning will, and it will probably hurt more (they have small mouths and teeth, you see). So you might as well enjoy drowning.”

Not super helpful.

Next time maybe try pointing out the breathtaking vistas on the beach. Note that there are a few patches of sand that aren’t feral-goat-infested. Even if you’re lying to me. Even if every square inch is full of teeth and hooves. Just lie, please. Thanks.

Miracle(s) of the Ceiling Fan

Home ownership. Ah, the joys. Every week there's a new adventure in "this was really not installed correctly the first time." I blame MacGyver. A whole generation of us grew up thinking there was no need for appropriate materials. A wad of chewing gum and a paperclip, and voila! Fixed.

So, for example, our coat closet has been nearly impossible to shut correctly for months, if not years. This week, I finally decided to figure out what was going on. It turns out that the screws that someone had used to replace one of the bottom hinges were completely wrong. They were really long and threaded on the end but not toward the head. The closet door, of course, is mostly hollow with just a half inch or so of solid wood to screw into at the beginning. So the screws went in with grippiness (a technical term) but then had nothing to grip with when it actually mattered. I took those screws out and replaced them with ones that worked.

Sadly, because I didn't have matching screws for the job, my replacements--though they work--are also, essentially a juryrigged job. Thank you, MacGyver.

We also have a pipe that was installed--by a licensed professional, ugh--that is not correct to code. We can't get hold of him to fix it. There's also the fact that nearly every door in our house has had problems, the really cheap matte paint throughout the whole house that looks disgusting at this point (because, hello!, children), the fencing that we had to replace when we moved in and that was not well-done (the gate is impossible to latch anymore; it hangs too low), and the wallpaper in the bathroom that someone just painted over instead of removing.*

But this week, we finally conquered one of the Things That Should Never Have Happened. The outdoor ceiling fan and light fixture.

Here's the thing: When you put up a fan outdoors, you're supposed to use an outdoor fan. Outdoor fans have nice covers that keep out the birds. Outdoor fan blades are not made out of cardboard that wilts and droops. Outdoor fans are meant to be used ... outdoors.

Our old fan/light combo was awful. I mean, the birds liked it (except that dead one last year that I found just hanging from it, upside down, stuck in all the nesting materials that were dangling from the motor housing--but that bird probably just died of old age). At least one new generation of offspring called that place its home. But we never used it, and it looked like the plague was coming for it. So we finally bought a new one, and I began to install it.

Look, I know everyone makes jokes about IKEA instruction manuals, but I think those IKEA manuals are amazing. I have never had a problem with them. The instructions for this Harbor Breeze fan, on the other hand--nope. And it's not the first ceiling fan/light kit I've put up, so I do have some basis for comparison. To be honest, actually, I think the thing could have been constructed to be easier to put together. It was surprisingly difficult, especially compared to the ones I've done in the past.

This is where we finally get to the miracle portion of the story.

In the process of removing the old fan, I was supposed to save the screws that attached to the outlet box so that I could attach the new fan. I knew this. But I was just not thinking very well, and so I allowed them both to drop to the ground (of our deck, which has slats that things can fall between). Then I got down from the ladder and actually threw one of them away in the bag full of garbage (including tons of nesting materials) from the old fan. I could not find the other.

And suddenly I remembered that I was supposed to save them. Argh. I hunted around the ground, tried to sift through the garbage bag, and couldn't find either. I had to give up for a while and figure out what to do (also to feed those pesky children who keep insisting that they need to eat occasionally!).

Fast forward to hours later when I explained the problem to Brice and he suggested we use our uber-strong magnet to try to find them. I found about five or six screws in the nesting junk, and it looked like one of them might be it. But only one. We needed two. So we sifted a little more, sorted again, and suddenly there were two. Seriously, I really don't know how we found the second one, but we did. It was just there. Miracle!

I went through the next several steps of installation, did all the wiring, and got the fan blades ready to attach. The design for this was really bad. It was extremely difficult to attach the fan blades because of the positioning of everything. I tried and tried, and I kept dropping the screws! This time I knew it was bad, so I put a rug under me to catch things, but it was still going badly. I dropped one that rolled off to who-knew-where. I got down to look around a bunch, and again, just when I'd sort of given up, I turned and saw Ammon playing with it. Yay!

Anyway, making a long story short, it was a little thing, but I really believe we were blessed with little miracles to help us finish the project. And now we have a nifty new ceiling fan/light that is meant to be used outdoors. Hooray!

* By the way, despite all the frustrations that sometimes attend home ownership, I'm so grateful that we have the opportunity. Our home has been such a blessing, and I'm grateful that we found it and grateful for our neighbors and friends, etc. But there are the downsides.

Recent Epiphanies

1. I realized this week that with six people in the house who usually wear clothing, we produce a load of dirty laundry almost every day. Nudism is suddenly looking more appealing.

2. I was sitting on the couch, rocking a bit in discomfort, and wondering what fresh horrors my period was going to visit upon me this month, when something occurred to me: I'm only thirty-six. That means I have ten years more of this, give or take. Ten. Years. I just ... bleh.*

3. We do not have a psycho neighbor who keeps sawing away our aluminum ties that Brice keeps putting on our fences. Hooray! Apparently squirrels like to chew on soft aluminum. Squirrels. Sigh.

4. Other things that happen when you have six people: You can easily eat an entire cantaloupe in one meal. You have to peel more than three clementines. You go through a LOT of water. Also, dishes. You rarely have as many leftovers as you think you will. Your dining room table that seemed so big when you first bought it now seems like a regular size. There is six times the amount of fun and silliness, chaos, and laughter, and tears, and joy.

5. Today is the day that Mormon Lit Blitz posts my story! That means I should be putting some sort of effort into advertising it, right? Because writers need to practice self-marketing? So here's me advertising. (I'm sorry to say that I'm going to send you on a link parade because it's much easier for me than re-copying all the pertinent info here, so ... sorry, not sorry.)


*Warning: In case you were considering giving me all sorts of wonderful advice about how to make periods less awful, probably don't bother. Either I've already read and dismissed it, or it would require suddenly becoming a new person (e.g., drink more water, eat healthier, lose weight, exercise more, etc., etc.--all good advice, but all obvious, and if I'm not succeeding at these things for general health purposes, it's not going to suddenly happen because I have lousy periods).**
**Double extra warning: Really, really don't comment if you're just going to say how wonderful periods are and I should really embrace them because womanhood! motherhood! yada yada! If you are going to say something like this, you should just be grateful that you're saying it from a safe distance.

Send in the chocolate reinforcements

Ever have one of those days where you have awesome intentions and then your child has a meltdown and then you have to put yourself in time out for ten minutes so you don't say something you'll really regret and then later you're cleaning the bathroom and your toddler runs the water out of the sink all over the floor and then you get through that crisis too and then your child drops a pickle jar on the floor and it breaks and the toddler is mad he can't play in the kitchen and the six year old is upset she can't eat the pickles and then she hides and screams and all you really want is to steal the entire bowl of pudding that your husband made and hide in your bedroom to eat it but you can't because the cranky, tired baby would probably grab it and spill it all over the carpet?

No? You haven't?

Me neither.

Mittelschmerz: The Good, the Bad, the Exceedingly Whiny

Warning: If you are inclined to blush over words like “ovulation,” you may want to skip this one. Also, if you want the short version, skip down to the recap in the last paragraph.

When in doubt, add a cute picture of your child in a box.

Several months after I gave birth to Addra, I started noticing weird cramping—weird because it kept convincing me that my period was coming, but then nothing would happen for another two weeks. This went on for several months before I realized this probably meant something. It was another several months before I realized it had a name: mittelschmerz, for middle pain. It’s a pain like menstrual cramping that comes around ovulation time. Apparently it’s normal for many women, and according to the Googoracle, it lasts up to two days.

Or in my case, three.

And then, in July, six. Only on and off, but six days did seem a little excessive.

I have a family history of trouble with all those “female parts.” Ovarian cysts, endometriosis, and fibroids, oh my! So I figured it was about time I get things checked out. An appointment with my doctor (who, in the midst of the ever-lovely pap smear, said everything seemed fine) led to an ultrasound just in case.

Which is where the real whining in this post starts. Also, as I have mentioned before, perhaps you think I talk too much about pee? If so, you should just skip this paragraph. … (Go ahead, skip it.) … Are you aware that one hour before getting this sort of ultrasound, you’re supposed to drink 32 ounces of water and not pee? Good golly, I probably don’t even drink 32 ounces in a day (and I don’t need any posts commenting that dehydration is probably exactly what’s wrong with me, thank you very much). I knew it was going to be bad, but I had no idea how bad. We’re talking I’m-driving-to-the-appointment-approaching-tears-because-I’m-going-to-explode-and-I-don’t-think-I’ve-peed-my-pants-since-elementary-but-I-might-break-that-streak-today kind of bad. The receptionist blandly declared that she’d never had any problems with drinking this much water for an ultrasound, but she knew other people sometimes did. And then, noticing that her statement was not comforting and I was still looking at the clock every 15 seconds, she took pity on me and said I could pee a little tiny bit if I thought I could manage it. Oh yes, believe me, I was going to find a way to manage it. That was almost worse (almost, but not quite) because I had to start and then stop. Do you have any idea how hard that is? The self-control! The angst! Ah, but afterward, so. much. better. I still couldn’t sit, though, and I was still pacing a bit. This had led me to a conclusion that I have often suspected (see here for evidence). My bladder really is itsy bitsy. It’s just a fact.

So, moving on. Got an ultrasound, external and internal (fun times!). Got the results. Little tiny fibroid, but nothing else (and little fibroids are quite common and not a cause for concern). Soooo…. (drum roll, please!) … There’s nothing wrong with my physical health as far as we can tell. (Snide remarks about my mental health are unnecessary.)

And here’s where I do some more whining and recognize that it’s incredibly super-duper lame-o-rific whining. First of all, I really am very grateful there’s nothing seriously wrong and nothing I need to get surgery for; given my family history, it was a real concern. But. I also really wish I understood why my body has decided to go all spazzy on me. Or rather, I really wish my body wouldn’t decide to go all spazzy on me. And I feel whiny about it because, of course, pleeeeenty of people have it far worse than I do. (Just ask, for example, my middle sister. Egad is all I have to say on that subject.) So I should really just buck up and be happy and deal with it, you know. Which is mostly what I do. But I still really wanted to whine about it a bit.

Plus, being whiny improved the title of my blog post. It wouldn’t have felt right as “Mittelschmerz: The Good, the Bad.” … Something’s just missing there. And I certainly wouldn’t want to ruin my blog post’s title by having a good attitude! Ah, the suffering I do for my craft.

So, the recap: I appear to be reasonably healthy. (Ish. But maybe I should start drinking more water?) I do still have annoying cramps, but since they’re not completely debilitating, I’m mostly quite grateful. Except for occasional bouts of extreme whininess.

The End.

Quarantine (in which I whine excessively)

Germs are tiresome. This is what I have officially concluded. We are going on two and a half weeks of sick here at the Stay household. Just colds, you understand, and when my brain is not fogged and clogged with all the goo my body is creating, I am indeed very grateful that all we have is colds. Truly we are blessed.

Still…

This morning I woke up thinking of the bliss of one more day of weekend, one more day that I would at least sort of get to rest a bit and prepare for the coming week. A bit over two weeks into our latest bout of illness, and only Brice and I are still sick. Coriel was first to get it and first to end it. Then Addra. Brice came next and lingered in sickness as he often does, largely because he’s doing such an amazing job of taking care of the rest of us and saving no rest for himself. I almost beat it this time, thanks to my dad’s excellent vitamin A advice. But no dice, here I am sick too, with that dreadful pressure that makes my head feel like it’s going to explode every time I attempt to blow the gunk out of my nose. But, I thought to myself, a couple more days and I’ll feel fine.

And then, this morning, Coriel slept in. A blessing indeed, I thought. And then she got up for breakfast.

And then she lay down to take a nap. Hooray, you say? You do not know my daughter.

The second time she lay down to rest, it became official. Coriel is sick.

Again.

This means I have at best a week or so to finish getting over my cold just in time to get whatever she’s got. Oh, and during that time, both Addra and Brice will also be getting sick.

The most dispiriting thing about this all, besides just feeling like a pile of yuck, is that we become quarantined, stuck with only ourselves for entertainment. Social engagements are canceled (the few we have planned), trips to the store or the bouncy place or even the gym are postponed. You can’t hire a babysitter, you can’t drop your kids off elsewhere for a couple hours of relaxation. (Well, you can sometimes foist them off on the grandmothers, but I doubt ours are coming back from Guatemala or whatever cloud my mom is crocheting on just to watch our sick kids.) There is no escape.

I have a friend who tells me to stay home and get some rest to get better. It has clearly been years since she had small children. There is nothing restful about staying home with two little ones. It is what I do every day. I do not get to nap when I feel like it or just sit around and watch romantic comedies. I get to take care of the kids.

I am tired of being quarantined. I am tired of being sick. I am entirely too whiny.

Write me something silly and completely unrelated to cheer me up?