Cold. Again.

So remember when I bored you all with wrote about our hideous issues with getting our furnace fixed back in October? Well, things had been going along swimmingly since then – we were warm and cozy and happy.

Until last night. When it broke again. And now we are none of those things.

I thought we were cold then – ha! At last count, it was 57 degrees in our house. So again, Sammy was up half the night… freezing temperatures + new teeth coming through = very sad baby. Fun stuff.

I am also in a great mood… the exhaustion of this time of year was enough to do me in already, but added to the stress of not knowing what the crap this is going to cost us is making me not very pleasant to be around (and apparently unable to write in complete sentences). Just ask my husband, who told me I was “grumpy” at 2:30 this morning. Grumpy is an understatement.

The low tonight? 16. 16! I can hardly wait.

Being a grown up sucks.

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Yet another post for the “Emily is Neurotic” file.

mouse
I am paranoid – paranoid – about mice in our house. (As an aside, searching “mouse” on Flickr was a giant mistake.)

Ugh, just the thought of it sends chills down my spine.

Mice haven’t been an issue in our current house (knock on wood, please God do not let those be famous last words) but there was a period of time when we had a serious issue with them when we lived in our old house. That was just one of the myriad exciting parts of living in a house that was built in 1888. But anyway. I am constantly waiting to find evidence of a mouse in our house, and I think it’s starting to be a problem.

As in, perhaps I need to seek help.

The other day, I saw what was probably a brownie crumb on our kitchen counter and I freaked out, thinking it was mouse droppings. I finally convinced myself that if it was just one, it was probably just a crumb and not a sign of the devil a mouse. I’ve started following the children around with the vacuum cleaner when they eat snacks downstairs.

And as of yesterday, my paranoia is actually keeping me up at night.

We started decorating our house for Christmas yesterday (more on that disaster later) and our tree goes where our dining room table typically sits. The easiest way to move the table to the basement is to move it out on the deck and carry it outside down to the back door. So, in between one trip from the basement to the deck, we left the door open. It was open and unmanned only long enough for me and Andy to walk up the stairs of the deck, grab a chair, and walk back down, but that was long enough for my imagination to run wild. Last night I dreamed that a mouse got in while the door was open, and I remember “seeing” it scurry (ewww even that word freaks me out) up the stairs. When I woke up, I realized it was just a dream, but just because I had dreamed it didn’t mean it wasn’t true, so I literally laid awake for probably close to an hour thinking about whether or not there was a mouse in the basement, how I could find out if there was, and how I could trap the nasty little thing.

I could not get back to sleep because I was so stressed out.

And now that I’m posting about this, it’s going to be just like yesterday when I thought to myself “I really love this pre-lit Christmas tree!” as I plugged in a level of branches, which of course didn’t light. So yeah. Now I am really screwed. I need something like a metal detector that works for mice. Yes, that would be great. Until someone invents one, though, I may never sleep again.

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Fail Whale

Today could very well prove to be my ultimate (to date, I’m sure there’s more to come) parenting FAIL.

I drop Kate off at my grandma’s on my way to work in the morning, and then my grandma takes her to school. As I left this morning, Kate told me she wasn’t feeling well and that her throat hurt and her back hurt (enter my suspicion – throat and back ailments aren’t a typical combination). She seemed ok, so I headed on, but about halfway through my commute she called again to tell me she wasn’t feeling good (despite her nutritious breakfast of cinnamon rolls and ice cream, which of course was the only thing that could possibly make her throat feel better). We agreed that Grandma would take her temperature, and if she didn’t have a fever, she’d go to school.

Great.

Except she called me again about 15 minutes later, still insisting that she didn’t feel well and she couldn’t go to school. I could, of course, be totally wrong about this, but I really do not think she is sick. Moms can tell these things, right? Yeah, famous last words. So in any case, we decided she would go to school and I said if she still felt bad there, she could have the secretary call me. I am banking on the fact that once she gets there, she will be fine.

However.

After I got off the phone with her, I checked my calendar and wouldn’t you know it, today is the day Kate will get the H1N1 vaccine at school. This day totally crept up on me. I was planning to prepare her for it, but I totally didn’t, and I was afraid that if I called her and told her after all we had gone through debating her attendance today anyway, that it would be a giant disaster.

So now she’s headed to school as we speak (or I type), blissfully unaware of the fact that she’s going to be vaccinated today. Unless, of course, she does know about the vaccination because of school announcements (the same way she found out about the skating party last week that I was conveniently not going to mention), and that’s where this entire problem is coming from.

Or maybe she is sick, and I didn’t believe her. And if she is sick, she shouldn’t be getting the vaccination. And that, my friends, would be a parenting fail of epic proportions.

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