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happy thanksgiving eve! a post that is not entirely about my kid
When we bought this house and had the addition put on it a few years ago, there were two rooms we barely touched: one of the front bedrooms (we had them replaced the light fixture and had also replaced the blinds and doorknob ourselves) and the hall bath (we had them add an exhaust fan because the addition required sealing up what had been the window). That bedroom is our guest room, and that bathroom is where the prince gets his baths even when we don't have company.
So some months ago when it looked like the kid was about to outgrow the baby bathtub, the little basin thing. and need to go in the full-sized bathtub, I told Himself that what I wanted for my birthday was to have the bathtub relined. It was at least 40 years old and even if we rinsed it with bleach it would never really come clean, and I didn't want the boy to have to get in all that griminess. Redoing the whole bathroom was on our Someday list (every homeowner has one), but slapping a new surface on the tub would put a five- or ten-year pin in that. Himself agreed and said we should also ask the plumber to take a look at repairing the fixtures, on account of sometimes when we turned on the hot water we'd get drips coming off the cold handle. :-/ But the plumber looked at the arrangement and said - long story short - he might be able to get the hardware out to repair it, but (a) he might not be able to get it back in again (that is, it might keep leaking worse when he put it back together), and (b) if it couldn't be repaired, he couldn't replace it because they don't make things that size and shape anymore, in which event we'd have these holes in our tiles, so we'd need retiling work at least on one end of the tub/shower, and by the way (c) the tile on the rest of the tub/shower area was just held together by grout and caulk and not actually connected to the wall anymore, so really the smart and responsible thing to do was ... redo the whole effing hall bath now instead of 10 years from now. (The plumber is not in league with the tile guy - we had known about item (c) and been hoping to put a pin in that as well, but.)
So we redid the hall bath, and it is better. Only the first couple times we bathed the kid in there, the hot water wasn't really very hot. We'd turn it all the way up and it would max out around lukewarm. Plumber came back and adjusted the limiter and that fixed the problem. And then a few days later I noticed that there was some peeling paint on the dining room ceiling right below the bathtub drain. /o\
Another long story short: They came out and looked again and did a lot of science and determined that the issue had been present when the water was lukewarm and the leak had been inadvertently fixed by adjusting the limiter - so today they're here repairing my dining room ceiling, because it's super important to the contractor, though not especially to us, to get it done before Thanksgiving.
Meanwhile, our other front bedroom shares a wall with the chimney, and two or three times since we bought the place we've had a crew in to repair the plaster wall and repaint where the roof and chimney have leaked a bit and there's been bubbling on the inside. That's a room we hardly ever use, so we didn't notice that there was more bubbling this summer when it rained so much - but it got really, really bad. The contractor sent out a roof guy who said the roof and flashing looked good to him and what we really needed was a chimney guy. So we had a chimney company out to do a lot of repairing and repointing, and now that that's done the interior crew is fixing the bedroom wall again and repainting and hopefully it will really stick.
I'm also sort of hoping they'll be done before the cleaners get here, because having two teams of servicefolks trying to work around each other seems like it would be really stressful for me, never mind for them.
This morning my kid was sitting in my lap and decided he'd drunk enough of his milk and said "Want to pat Mommy's hair." Put his milk down and turned to me and smoothed my hair down into my face with both hands. It's actually very soothing. :-) "Close your eyes," he said, with the right pronoun and everything - speaking more clearly every day, every hour it sometimes seems - and just stroked my head and my face and said "Mommy sleeping." When I said no, Mommy's not sleeping, he said "Mommy resting." ♥♥♥
Oh! In other news, I bought a weighted blanket and have been sleeping under it for five or six nights now, and it's quite good. It's not totally life-changing, but I think my life has been pretty easy on the continuum of difficulties, so. I haven't had trouble falling asleep when I first go to bed at night, so the fact that I fall asleep within minutes is not new; but now when I wake up in the middle of the night, I fall back asleep much more quickly than I'd been doing. Seriously: within minutes rather than lying awake for an hour or more. Worth the price of admission right there. And for a side benefit, it seems to be nicely handling the tension in my right shoulder. So I think we have a winner.
I'm working from home today, as I always do on a Wednesday, but there isn't a ton of work to do, which isn't a shocker on the day before Thanksgiving. Some time today I need to make a pie crust. And generally stay out of the way of the professionals who are Doing Things to my house that I can't or can't manage to do myself.
So some months ago when it looked like the kid was about to outgrow the baby bathtub, the little basin thing. and need to go in the full-sized bathtub, I told Himself that what I wanted for my birthday was to have the bathtub relined. It was at least 40 years old and even if we rinsed it with bleach it would never really come clean, and I didn't want the boy to have to get in all that griminess. Redoing the whole bathroom was on our Someday list (every homeowner has one), but slapping a new surface on the tub would put a five- or ten-year pin in that. Himself agreed and said we should also ask the plumber to take a look at repairing the fixtures, on account of sometimes when we turned on the hot water we'd get drips coming off the cold handle. :-/ But the plumber looked at the arrangement and said - long story short - he might be able to get the hardware out to repair it, but (a) he might not be able to get it back in again (that is, it might keep leaking worse when he put it back together), and (b) if it couldn't be repaired, he couldn't replace it because they don't make things that size and shape anymore, in which event we'd have these holes in our tiles, so we'd need retiling work at least on one end of the tub/shower, and by the way (c) the tile on the rest of the tub/shower area was just held together by grout and caulk and not actually connected to the wall anymore, so really the smart and responsible thing to do was ... redo the whole effing hall bath now instead of 10 years from now. (The plumber is not in league with the tile guy - we had known about item (c) and been hoping to put a pin in that as well, but.)
So we redid the hall bath, and it is better. Only the first couple times we bathed the kid in there, the hot water wasn't really very hot. We'd turn it all the way up and it would max out around lukewarm. Plumber came back and adjusted the limiter and that fixed the problem. And then a few days later I noticed that there was some peeling paint on the dining room ceiling right below the bathtub drain. /o\
Another long story short: They came out and looked again and did a lot of science and determined that the issue had been present when the water was lukewarm and the leak had been inadvertently fixed by adjusting the limiter - so today they're here repairing my dining room ceiling, because it's super important to the contractor, though not especially to us, to get it done before Thanksgiving.
Meanwhile, our other front bedroom shares a wall with the chimney, and two or three times since we bought the place we've had a crew in to repair the plaster wall and repaint where the roof and chimney have leaked a bit and there's been bubbling on the inside. That's a room we hardly ever use, so we didn't notice that there was more bubbling this summer when it rained so much - but it got really, really bad. The contractor sent out a roof guy who said the roof and flashing looked good to him and what we really needed was a chimney guy. So we had a chimney company out to do a lot of repairing and repointing, and now that that's done the interior crew is fixing the bedroom wall again and repainting and hopefully it will really stick.
I'm also sort of hoping they'll be done before the cleaners get here, because having two teams of servicefolks trying to work around each other seems like it would be really stressful for me, never mind for them.
This morning my kid was sitting in my lap and decided he'd drunk enough of his milk and said "Want to pat Mommy's hair." Put his milk down and turned to me and smoothed my hair down into my face with both hands. It's actually very soothing. :-) "Close your eyes," he said, with the right pronoun and everything - speaking more clearly every day, every hour it sometimes seems - and just stroked my head and my face and said "Mommy sleeping." When I said no, Mommy's not sleeping, he said "Mommy resting." ♥♥♥
Oh! In other news, I bought a weighted blanket and have been sleeping under it for five or six nights now, and it's quite good. It's not totally life-changing, but I think my life has been pretty easy on the continuum of difficulties, so. I haven't had trouble falling asleep when I first go to bed at night, so the fact that I fall asleep within minutes is not new; but now when I wake up in the middle of the night, I fall back asleep much more quickly than I'd been doing. Seriously: within minutes rather than lying awake for an hour or more. Worth the price of admission right there. And for a side benefit, it seems to be nicely handling the tension in my right shoulder. So I think we have a winner.
I'm working from home today, as I always do on a Wednesday, but there isn't a ton of work to do, which isn't a shocker on the day before Thanksgiving. Some time today I need to make a pie crust. And generally stay out of the way of the professionals who are Doing Things to my house that I can't or can't manage to do myself.
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