Pushed It Too Far

I knew it would happen. I pushed it too far, and it wasn’t happy. I’m talking about the washing machine. I managed to get 2 loads out of it on Sunday evening when we got back from my mom’s house. It was being a nice washer (even though it made horrible noises the whole time). So yesterday I decided to try my luck at one more load. The nice washer started up & began filling with water, so I happily packed it full of the last of the dirty clothes, thinking we had successfully convinced it to wait until Thursday to poop out again (we have a repair person scheduled to come out that day to look at it). A little while later I noticed it was quiet in the laundry room. I pondered out loud whether it had finished or if it had just stopped. Josh went with me to go check it out. Stupid thing just stopped – MID-LOAD! I mean, really. If you’re going to break, couldn’t you have done it before I had started? Or waited until after this load was done? Why in the middle?? Now I had a machine full of wet, soapy clothes. So we loaded them into a basket & took them into the kitchen to rinse the soap out. How people hand-washed clothes back in the old days is beyond me. Then I plopped all the sopping wet clothes back into the basket (you can only squeeze so much water out by hand…) and we threw them into the dryer, where they probably tumbled around for half the night since they were so wet (poor Herschel – he HATES the dryer, and he stays in the laundry room at night…). To add insult to injury, we keep seeing all these commercials for these nice, pretty, new front-loading washers & dryers. Ours is old-school – top-loading washer & front-loading dryer but it doesn’t have the nifty window that you can see through – I bet this would keep the kids entertained for a while if we had one. AND…when Josh called Sears to set up a visit from a repair person, the lady asked him if it was a front-loading washer. When he said no, she was like, “Oh……” Like, you poor people with your crappy washer. Yes, we know it’s crappy! But it’s paid for. So we will see what they say when they come to look at it. The set is old – like, probably going on 10 years. It’s probably time for a new one. But since we are still paying for our new floors (for the next 6 months or so), we’re not necessarily interested in buying a new washer & dryer right now (why a new dryer too, you may ask, when our old dryer is still perfectly fine? Because they have to match, silly!)

Meanwhile, paci withdrawal may have set in with Liam, as he has been very irritable at bedtime the past few nights. Although it has not prevented him from going to sleep without it – he sleeps just fine. He is just crazy mad when he gets out of the bath. Come to think of it, he is crazy mad in the mornings too…Zachary was also crying about something this morning, and I think it was at that moment that Josh realized that he lives in a house full of people who are not morning people. Josh is a morning person, but the rest of us, not so much. Which is ironic, considering that the kids wake up so early – especially on the weekends. Don’t know what that is all about. I guess we can file that under “Life’s not fair.”

On a lighter note, my mom recently cleaned out her garage. She’s got a bunch of my old stuff stored in the garage, so while we were over there on Sunday I went through some of it. She had several tubs of my old stuffed animals, so we got them down, & I figured I’d let the kids go through them to see if there was anything they wanted. Out of everything in the boxes, it looks like Zachary’s favorite things were the trio of stuffed flamingoes – including one that is about as big as he is. Josh wasn’t super excited about his choice, but I think he was more drawn to the fact that the one was so big, and there were 3 of them (i.e., a family of flamingoes) than their actual color. There were also several stuffed Pooh bears, which I was trying to encourage Liam to take. He seems to have gravitated towards a stuffed frog with a rattle thing inside. Which is fine, because so far we’ve been unsuccessful in getting him to say “Pooh”. He keeps saying “Moo”, which I’m worried will only cause confusion, since Pooh is not a cow.