Friday, October 18, 2013

7 Quick Takes Friday: Mae and the Heating Vents Edition




For the past week the nights in this house have been incredibly long.  Patrick, usually our champion sleeper, has been waking up hourly.  He screams.  I would nurse him.  I would walk him.  Paul would walk him.  I would lay down next to him.  Nothing.  The child simply wouldn't sleep.

Was he sick?  Was he getting a new tooth?

Today he slept through his nap (exhaustion from a week without sleep?) and it somehow popped into my head that he might be afraid of the dark.  I found a light to plug in, and as I did so right before bedtime I noticed another cord.

The cord to his white noise machine.

Patrick has slept with that machine for most of his life.  There's also a huge fan going in the room all the time, to help drown out the sound of Mae jumping on her bed and moving furniture and carrying on at all hours of the night, so I hadn't noticed that during one of her double gate fence hops she'd come into his room and played with it and apparently turned it off.

I turned it back on and within five minutes Patrick had fallen asleep by himself.

That machine is worth it's weight in gold if it helps him sleep that soundly through the night.


I haven't seen a mouse in a couple weeks now.  I mentioned that fact to Paul and he pointed out that the calico cat from next door has pretty much adopted our house and is living in our back yard, right next to the part of the wall on the back side of the stove (where the mice always appear).

I feel like we need to send the cats owner a fruit basket.


The 13,983rd thing I love about living someplace that isn't tropical is that knitting doesn't make me feel depressed.  When I'd want to pick up my knitting needles when we lived in Florida I'd always feel a little sad because I knew there was no way anyone would be wearing anything that I made...  Now, as each day gets a little chillier, I am relishing picking up my knitting needles and casting on new projects:



Yesterday I began the task of updating my blog roll after Paul pointed out that there was a blog on there that said it hadn't been updated in six years and "have you even being doing this for that long?" (no, no I have not... in reality most of the blog had been removed at some point of the last five years).  I began by deleting all the links that hadn't been updated in more than a year... but it's still a work in progress.

And there are a lot of blogs I read that aren't on there so... baby steps towards being a bit more organized on the blog roll front.



Earlier today:

Me:  "I'm going to make lunch so I'll be in the kitchen.  If you want to you can watch TV." (and by TV I mean, a movie, since we don't have cable)
Sadie:  "No thank you.  It's not good for Patrick's brains."
Me: "It's okay for him to watch it once in a while when you guys have it on.  Just not a lot."
Sadie:  "Mommy.  TV isn't good for baby brains.  I don't want his brains turning to mush.  We're not turning it on."

Okay...
I wasn't able to stay awake until the end of the game last night... but:

We're pretty happy.


And this is how we started out this morning.  I guess we'll be finding a way to bolt this apparently unbolted vent down this afternoon.

She pulled down the curtain and the jackets of the rack and moved the chair and I thought, "oh cute, she's making a fort"... and then I saw this.  It's one of the few vents that I haven't covered with a heavy (raised) piece of furniture for this very reason (the others are like two feet wide and a foot across and covered with these flimsy wood screens... and they scare me... so they're under a couch and a huge chest).  Apparently I was right to be concerned about the larger ones:



For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

6 comments:

  1. I'm proud of you for not having cable; so many equate this as a necessity right up there with food. Myself, I do have cable TV, but the lowest package Comcast offers. I pay $23/month, which gets me the local channels, WGN out of Chicago, and even a few channels which have movies or old shows, like Lassie, Jack Benny, and Magnum PI.

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  2. I cleaned out my feedly yesterday... One of these days I'll get around to updating my blog roll! That picture of your kiddo in the vent is priceless :-)

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  3. Oh my goodness! What a little stinker!

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  4. I could see my dd doing something like that with the vents except that our house at the time had radiators. (and I don't think her room had one?) She did climb up and sleep on her dresser once (which was tied to the wall securely)
    You're dd reminds me a lot of mine except that there's way more help around now. But regardless; mine is now 18 and doing great. (she's a lot more like a 14 year old but that's still upward progression that will continue so my advice is to create your own personal timeline and ignore the actual years)

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  5. When I saw where Mae was, I gasped! Thank goodness she didn't get down into the duct work! I guess it makes sense she would love a place like that to crawl into; it's just like a fort or cave. Bet it made her feel great! It's funny, it's almost like you have to see your house through her eyes always thinking, "now, what would Mae make of that?" Oh, boy, what a pistol! Bonnie.

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