a hodge podge

As I pulled cat urine carpet and pad from our living room and hall today I was thinking of new and exciting ways I could blog about cat pee. Looking back, I wish the largest contributing factor of drama to my day was stinky carpet.

One of our window frames is broken - it won’t stay up. It’s been like that since we moved in - there was a piece of wood used to hold the window open. We didn’t think much of it because 1) we hadn’t opened our windows much before the last week or two and 2) it was behind our couch and pretty inaccessible. That is until, today when we were pulling up the carpet.

Emma was looking out the window and we told her several times not to touch the window. I finished telling her for literally the fifth time in twenty minutes, turned around…and heard screaming. She knocked the wood out and got her hands crushed by the very heavy window. I am thanking God that some of the wood got stuck in the window so the whole weight of it wasn’t on her baby fingers. I thought her fingers would be broken because it is so heavy and she immediately had huge blisters and some bleeding. We took her to the E.R. It was our first trip there for one of our children.

The hospital was more tramautic for her than the window incident. It was new and scary, she was in pain and to top it off she hadn’t napped yet today. The poor baby. Through the x-rays and blood pressure tests she kept crying to go to the “Mickey Mousey store” (The Disney Store) as we had told her earlier in the day we would do soon.

We were told a good report: no broken bones! and headed off to the Mickey Mousey store where you better believe she picked out some fine princess goods. She ended up with a silver princess cardigan, a silver princess skirt and an Emma- sized Fuggarugga doll.

As it stands, my baby girls are sound asleep and my living room smells better.

By request…

Our second year of Bible and Missions School was about to begin. It was the fourth night of Word Explosion and T.D. Jakes had just finished a powerful service. But we were hungry so we invited our friends over and we were all excited to eat some homemade chicken strips. I started the oil on the stove, and even though we were right there the oil caught fire. We tried to put it out but we could not. Daniel got some bad burns on his arm and face from the oil. The fire spread through the kitchen and laundry room and our whole apartment and all of our belongings had terrible smoke damage.

Call us stupid, uninformed or ignorant but now we are much more educated on the topic of putting out fires. We didn’t know fire extinguishers are rated for different kinds of fire, that dumping flour on it would have put the fire out or that putting the lid back on would have put the fire out. That information is helpful to know before you have a fire.

Anyways, it was pretty awful. Daniel was taken to the ER in an ambulance (he even made it into the newspaper), our apartment was shot, our stuff was unusable from smoke and from “ceiling gunk” from the firefighters ripping open the ceiling to make sure the fire hadn’t spread. It was pretty amazing that my parents were scheduled to fly in early the next morning for the second half of Word Explosion. It was such an added source of strength to have them there with us.

The maintenance men from our apartment said the management would help us find a new apartment the following morning. That night we stayed with some friends. Well, the next morning management told us they wanted us out in 48 hours because of fire caused by negligence blah, blah, blah (it was kind of illegal what they were asking of us). We spoke with my attorney brother and before things got ugly they changed the tune they were humming. We were able to move in right next to the charred apartment.

We did have renters insurance (I am so glad we did, it was wonderful!). Our insurance paid for a restoration service to come and clean out our old apartment, sort through our things, and clean what they could and deliver our clean items to our new place. We were able to keep most of our things. They made my beloved red couch as good as new. Insurance covered our hotel stay and food until we could move into the new apartment.

Even though it was a few years ago, I’m still pretty uncomfortable cooking with oil.

the room still stinks.

feeling overwhelmed and helpless…all we can do is wait for the owners to make decisions. (pete is not the owner, only the manager)

exhale

sunday after church our landlord (pete) came over. he walked in the girl’s room, was slapped in the face with stink and began tearing the carpet up. it quickly got better, but we discovered that the pretty hard wood floors had been saturated in some areas. he sanded and shellacked in those areas and our problems seem to be solved. since the floors are so nice under the ugly carpet, we might pull up all the carpet. hopefully the drama is nearly over.

the roof will be done on friday.

i got a ton of “those” boxes (what do i do with this stuff?) unpacked last night. Lots of it went in the garage sale pile.

daniel is going out of town this weekend so my mom and i are gonna try and attack the rest of the house…maybe i’ll be able to post pictures on monday.

have you ever seen the movie the money pit? i feel like that is where we are living. okay, maybe that is a bit dramatic…but so have our first few weeks at the new house.

painting was fun and decorating is even more fun. the rest, not so much. after we have lived here for a few days we noticed a smell in the girls’ room. we contacted our landlord, wondering if smelly cats were the previous tenants (mandy, get the reference? ) to see if it was possibly a pet odor. we were wondering if there was a mysterious mold or possibly a dead animal in the vents. our landlord stopped by to take a whiff, didn’t smell anything, but assured us that he would not leaving us hanging. we will return to this as the post is in sequential order.

on another level of the house, the basement drain overflowed on to the floor when we did laundry. that has been snaked out three times. that seems to be resolved. oh yes…and the plumber told us that our playroom should not be by the drain in case of sewer backup and the risk of hepatitis (what the heck?).

our roof is being redone on friday. the electric will follow the roof.

our tub dripped onto the hot water heater. we now have a new tub drain.

daniel’s mom saved the day when she came and with certainty identified the smell as cat urine (i think i was the only person ever that was excited to find that an odor was cat urine). she brought along this enzyme that will “eat” the urine and the odor (so, how many times do you think i can use ‘urine’ in this post!?). to our amazement, the smell got worse. like, really bad. the girls did not sleep in their room last night and we pulled everything out of their room. emma’s bed is currently upside down on the futon in the library. daniel pulled up the corner of the carpet to access the damage. the carpet and the carpet pad are DISGUSTING with….you guessed it, cat urine. i mean, so gross. our landlord is coming by tomorrow to smell for himself. he just told daniel, over the phone, that we will just have to rip out the carpet. new floors too! which is too bad, i was pretty attached to this old brown marble carpet.

all in all, i am thankful for this house and still feel like it is a blessing from God. it is still a great house and an amazing price. one of the most amazing things is that our landlord is a christian and is very concerned that things get taken care of quickly. *exhale*

i’ve been throwing up all afternoon. i hate puking.

i’m really not doing this to get out of packing.

just in time for christmas emma has come down with a yucky cold. poor baby. her eyes are puffy, you can tell her head is stuffy and cloudy, her nose is runny, she can’t breathe or sleep…

so daniel has affectionately named her “snombie” (snot + zombie).

i’m nervous about tonight. sleep well, sweet snombie.

While shopping at Target today with my mom and the girls, I almost started crying in the baby section. No, it wasn’t because I saw how small newborn clothes were and how big Emma is…Another mom was there with her two daughters - I’d guess 2 and 5 years old. The older daughter was crying about something silly like she wanted more popcorn or slurpee (although I could relate to that desire!) and the mom was responding harshly to her with comments like, “Look at all these babies here, you’re the oldest and you’re the one crying… Maybe you’re the baby…I should put you back in diapers…I’m so sick of your crying, you cry all the time…I’m putting you back in diapers…”.

I was so upset, I wanted to grab the mom and say “Don’t you know what you’re doing, how your words influence her”. I knew that if she treated her like this it was probably a common thing. My heart broke for the girl, I couldn’t imagine being treated that way consistently by the one who was supposed to nurture you. I also wanted to take the daughter aside and let her know that she is special. Instead I just lifted up a prayer for their family.

You’ve heard of King Crab, right? Our evening was filled by Queen Crab (aka a Miss Emma Grace). She existed in meltdown mode all evening nearing the end of her rope and succeeded in bringing us near the end of ours as well. She only napped half as long as usual today, so I’m sure that’s the source, but goodness…I am glad it is bed time and I am glad, tonight, that Daddy is putting her down.

Emma is learning to share. The flu bug that she had landed on me the night she began to feel better…and then it landed on me with a vengence. It was rough. But my wonderful husband stayed home to take care of his sickly wife and recovering daughter. Then the night I should have been feeling better it bit Daniel. We decided to ship Emma off to my parents because we were both feeling too sick to care for her overnight. Yesterday morning, I woke up to my phone ringing — it was my Dad saying he needed to bring Emma home since my Mom had gotten sick! O my. So yesterday my mom came over and we each took a couch, let Emma bounch between us because in Daniel’s words “two sick people make up almost 75% of a normal adult”. Today we are all better and are looking forward to some fresh air.