A Couple Almost-Emergencies And Some Quiet Days

Remember how I was saying that I was feeling overwhelmed and overscheduled a couple days ago?  Well, the universe/God/coincidence intervened and took care of that for me. 

Tuesday night, Eden woke up with horrible stomach pains that kept her awake for a couple hours.  After that she slept fine and woke up feeling okay, but late morning the pain kept back.  After a couple hours of her laying in a tightly curled ball on the couch and whimpering in pain, I was polling friends and acquaintances for information about viruses going around, calling our nurse, and generally getting very worried.  Our nurse advised that if the pain was intermittent it was likely a virus, but if it was constant and getting worse, we should take her to the ER (probably fearing appendicitis).  So basically, don’t worry at all, or worry very much.  It’s hard to gauge someone else’s pain, but I knew it was bad. 

Right when I was on the verge of deciding to take her in just in case, she started vomiting and feeling better, being able to keep Tylenol down and sleep, and the virus started acting like a normal virus.  Phew.  Emergency averted.

Meanwhile, while the kids were napping that day, I started hearing an increasingly high-pitched whistling noise, like a giant tea kettle would make.  Well, you know what’s basically a giant tea kettle?  A hot water heater.  I sleuthed my way around the house until I got to the basement and saw the relief valve spilling out almost boiling water onto our basement floor.  The whistling had stopped for the moment so I went upstairs to try to contact Kasey and figure out what the heck was going on.  Well, whenever there’s a near emergency of any kind, the universe/God/coincidence intervenes and Kasey becomes unreachable.  Maybe this is supposed to instill some sort of confidence in my ability to handle these situations on my own.  That doesn’t tend to happen, though.  So I did the next best thing, and put an all-call out on facebook for hot water heater help and started googling. 

Then I started hearing the whistling again.  I made my way downstairs, but then the whistling got higher, and higher, and higher, into registers that only dogs can hear, and I got scared.  I ran upstairs and got in a corner far away from where the hot water tank would be blasting through the floor.  You think I’m overreacting, but mythbusters proves that a hot water tank can blast through 2 floors of a house.  Thankfully we had seen this episode and even though I didn’t recall it consciously at the time, my subconscious must have remembered and my self-protection kicked in. 

The whistling stopped, the overflowing recommenced, and my facebook peeps came through.  I shut off the gas and the water, my dad stopped by to double-check, and all was well.  Phew.  Emergency averted. 

So that was an exciting day. 

And then, instead of having days too full with too little margins, my days became one big blank space.  I love when that happens.

Since then, we’ve been in calm, vacation-like mode.  It’s nice to have an excuse to not leave the house and to watch a lot of tv.  Grandma brought over some fresh DVDs and snacks.  Kasey MacGyvers the hot water tank every morning to give us enough hot water to stay stink free and wash stomach virus laundry. 

Today my girl’s feeling a lot better so I’m trying to entice her away from the tv.  We made playdough with our favorite recipe.  We omitted the spices because she wanted it to be green, and then she and Isaac played with it for a loooooong time.  Never underestimate the power of fresh playdough.  I got a shower, made muffins, and wrote.  Ahhhh. 

Our near-emergencies acted as a giant reset button, and my kids are acting less like monkeys and more like their sweet selves.  I’m feeling little stress and am enjoying cuddles with my girl on the couch and wrestling with my boy on the floor. 

Sometimes it's hard to figure out what is a cosmic joke, what is God intervening directly, and what is coincidence.  Today I'm less interested in figuring that out and more interested in laughing at the joke and being thankful for the unexpected free time to enjoy.  Here’s to the quiet days!