I don’t know what it is about this weekend, but here’s a few items illustrating the pitfalls of owning a home and raising a family:
Saturday evening I noticed that the dryer had died. More specifically, that the drum belt had broken; the dryer would run, but the drum wouldn’t turn. So I spent most of this morning figuring out how to open the thing up, then buying a new belt and figuring out just how to fix it and put it all back together again. (You’d think a belt would be easy or intuitive to replace. If you’re like me, you’d be wrong.) Joy. It works, though.
The event that led up to me discovering the dryer wasn’t working? My son, our youngest, was sick; he ate only a bite or two of dinner, then went to lie down on the couch. Which he then threw up on. But it wasn’t just the bite or two of dinner he threw up; it was lunch, too. So, I got to interrupt my dinner to clean up vomit from the couch. It was also on a throw pillow, which I cleaned, and was going to put in the dryer—and discovered the problem with the dryer.
Same kid, twice over this past week, has set off his Tickle Me Elmo in the middle of the night (5:10-ish the first time, 2:10-ish the next time). Nothing’s quite as freaky as waking up in the dead of night out of a deep sleep hearing Elmo saying, “Elmo’s not ticklish there! Tickle Elmo again!”
Our dryer is 10 years old and I’ve had to work on it several times. I’ve never had a broken belt, but I’ve had to change the bearing that the drum spins on, and the "idler assembly" which is the wheel putting tension on the belt. Dryers are fairly simply mechanically and I’ve saved a lot of money fixing it myself.
Hope your boy gets better!
On the lines of the Elmo – the boys have a Bert & Ernie motorcycle thing-a-ma-bob that seems to randomly go off, so I awake (cuz AJ sleeps through anything) to a roaring motorcycle going through the boys room. It’s given me a few odd nightmares and a couple heart attacks. – oh joys of parenthood 😉
My daughter had a little dancing moose thing that, when squeezed, play as loud as f**kin’ possible "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer". She’d constant roll over onto the thing. And the battery for it wasn’t easily removable, so we had to completely rip the seams, remove the proprietary stupidly-high-capicity battery, and sew the thing back together.
Thankfully, her talking teletubbies have easy to remove batteries, as those things freaked me out.
Yeah, fixing the dryer turned out to be no big deal, I just needed to stop overthinking it.
And noisy stuffed toys are fun, aren’t they? Another time in the week one of the cats stepped on one of those in the toybox and set it off. It was a frog that has a variety of buttons that play different songs and/or games. Our house is becoming the Toy Twilight Zone at night.
Christian was always illogically afraid of Billy th Big Mouthed Bass. He freaked out whenever it lifted up its head and started singing "Don’t worry, be happy".
Well, sure. That thing freaks me out too. 🙂