Painting, Pipes, and Pancakes.

So, you know you're a homeowner when… 

...your son climbs up the shelves in the closet, rips them out of the wall, and you spend your weekend replacing the shelves. Glorious. But, I didn't like the old shelves anyway, and now we get a trial run at installing shelves so we can do a better job in our bedroom closet. P.S. The instructions on the drywall toggles LIE. I was irritated enough that I went to Home Depot's website and wrote a review. GRR.

Sanding and getting ready to paint. 

Mr. Graff painting our hall closet. (If you look carefully, you can see Caleb in his baby swing.)

Rae needed to paint because Daddy was painting. 

Always look for the silver lining. 

Speaking of silver lining… I nearly had a heart attack this week. Metaphorical heart attack, that is. Rae came out and told me that there was water in the kitchen. I stomped into the kitchen, sure that Rae had dumped his cup of water on the floor. I mopped it up, griping at Rae. Then I looked down, noticed more water, griped some more, mopped some more up. 

Then I noticed that the water was still coming out. 

And out. 

And out. 

And out. 

Water was flooding into my kitchen. Enter Panic. What if all this water is seeping down from the upstairs neighbor because of the water dumped on their home during the fire? Water damage. Panic. Panic. Panic. 

The condo association sends out a contractor. He looks at it, goes upstairs, comes back, goes back upstairs. He shuts off the main water in my home. Meanwhile, the flood has gone under my fridge, under my washer and dryer and over to the wall next to my bedroom. And I have a crying baby. Panic. Panic. Panic. 

Mr. Graff comes home. He starts bailing out our kitchen with a dust pan and a bucket. Then towels. We go through all our towels.

(Rae, of course, loved running through the water) 

Howard, the contractor, comes back and goes to our water heater closet and shuts off another valve. It the valve that runs to the neighbors back hose. Apparently when the condos were built, they didn't do much in the way of separating the water lines because the condo association pays for the water, not the individual residents. So we have our upstairs neighbor's cut off valve for their outdoor hose. 

Which is fine. Unless, of course, your neighbor had a fire, their house is uninhabitable, so they turned off their heat and it is the middle of winter. So the pipes froze and then… burst.  

The water stopped flooding after Howard shut off the valve. I got to see the back of my washer/dryer for the first time. And Amra made us dinner that night. 

Silver lining? We don't have water damage and get to stay in our house. 

More silver lining? Rae told me there was a problem and he didn't cause it. I apologized for griping at him. 

 Mr. Graff finally got a chance to use his Ebleskiver pan! (He's used it before, but it's been a while.)  We made pancakes, bacon, and ebleskiver's for dinner. Here are the ebleskivers and said pan: 

Mr. Graff used bamboo skewers to flip the batter around until it cooks into nice round balls. The batter is basically pancake batter with a little extra yummy like apples or chocolate or cheese in the middle. Delicious. 

Rae got to the table before we finished setting it and helped himself to sprinkles and bacon. 

Here's what my other littles were up to… 

Joe has been keeping me up at night. Like, screaming in pain for at least two hours, then falling into a restless sleep for an hour and a half and then waking up for the day. It has been exhausting, and to be honest, I haven't expected much of myself this week. I've let Rae sit in front of the T.V. for more hours than I care to admit to just so I could get the basics done and not become a zombie. Yikes. 

[Rae tells me he likes to watch "dirty things" on the computer. He's talking about Dirty Jobs from Discovery channel.  We have a couple collections of it and like to watch it together. Also, I've noticed a striking similarity in personalities between the host Mike Rowe and Rae.]

On the other hand, after nearly a week of this, I'm getting better at calming Joe down and getting him back to sleep. Last night, it only took me an hour. And I think his ear drum burst so at least now it is draining and less painful. Also, his cyst in his mouth is growing and he chews on it and drools more. 

The up side is that the insurance approved his CT scan, so we get to schedule that and then talk to the doctor and then have surgery to remove the cyst and take another look at his ears. His doctor has now called his cyst a "ranula", and when I did research on it this week, there are three ways to treat it: remove it, open it so it drains to the mouth, or remove it and the salivary gland that it is connected to. We've done the first option twice, and it has grown back twice. So, this time, he will have the third option done---the cyst will be removed along with the gland. The Cochrane library says that the third option has a 0% recurrence rate for that procedure, where the other two have a 25%, and 38% recurrence rates. 

So, cross our fingers, we will be done with this cyst and maybe someday Joe will want to eat. 

After Nursery today at church, I picked Joe up and he lunged forward, reaching for his teachers. So sweet. I'm glad that he likes his teachers. 

Caleb is pretty much perfect. He's beautiful and he sleeps well at night. You can forgive him for anything because he sleeps so well. 

He's lately been trying to sit up. He'll pull his abs in and crunch forward when we try to feed him. He'll also pull his abs in an crunch forward when he is lying on his back, which makes him roll to his side. He then relaxes his abs and rolls back onto his back and repeats this until he has wound up rotating in a circle. So far, it takes him about ten minutes for him to do a 270 degree turn. 

I can also forgive him for anything because he is generally happy. He coos and smiles big. He makes all kinds of sounds that I haven't heard from Joe. He loves to babble. 

And those are my stories. We painted. We burst pipes. We ate pancakes. We're zombies and scheduling things for Joe. We love the baby. 

The end.