Wednesday, January 13, 2016

The Post with A Flood, A Ceiling Collapse, a Trip to the ER, and a Broken Sewing Machine

One random moment where nothing
dramatic was happening.  Thank goodness!
Have you ever had a week where you're almost afraid to ask "What's going to happen next?"

That's how the last week has been.  I know it's not the worst week ever, or even our worst week ever, but it's been a week of mini disasters.

It started on Thursday when the kids were playing in the girls' room.  The girls' room is almost entirely baby/toddler proofed and I was laying down on Maggie's bed while they ran and jumped and played.

Suddenly James was on the bed next to me.  He'd climbed up onto the lower bunk all by himself.  I carefully watched his movements, ready to catch him if he fell, but after about ten minutes I began to relax while staying near him..  There are lots of things he can't do in the large motor skill area, but he's a pretty good climber and he's usually pretty cautious, sliding over to the edge of the trampoline and sliding off backwards.  I should have remembered though my conversation with his doctor where the pediatrician said "he's braver than he has the motor skills to be..."

He moved just beyond my reach when he tried to launch himself at the bunk bed ladder and fell, hitting his head first on the ladder and then on the floor before I could grab him.

He was fine, other than two large bruises on his forehead, but unknowingly the week of mini disasters had begun.

Disaster #2 truly earned the title.  It began when Paul let me sleep in on Saturday morning.  I woke up when my cell phone rang at 6:50 am, ten minutes before I was going to get up, and Paul asked me if  I was taking a shower or bath.  I had a sinking in my stomach as I confirmed that I was in the bedroom and asked him why he was asking.

Apparently water had begun to pour down into the kitchen and he and Sadie were trying to find the source.

I didn't need to look.  I knew where it was coming from.

James and his two giant bruises...
Our upstairs area is open to Maggie now.  She can go upstairs whenever she wants.  We've installed a series of heavy duty locks, at the very top of the doors, on all of the rooms upstairs.  That way, we can lock all the rooms except the kids' rooms and she can go up and down and we don't have to worry about her breaking into the medicine cabinet or flooding the bathroom.  The hallway is empty.  The staircase is empty.  There's nothing she can hurt or be hurt with.  It gives her the freedom to go upstairs and take a break if she's overwhelmed by noises downstairs.

On that morning though, Paul was carrying James and while he thought he'd gotten the lock to click into place on the bathroom door, it hadn't.

Every morning Maggie goes upstairs and checks all the doors that are locked.  And she immediately caught on that the bathroom wasn't.

Paul got the water turned off.  It was all coming from the sink.  She managed to flood the entire bathroom, including filling every drawer and the tupperware under the sink with the hottest possible water.

I ran downstairs to find the ceiling tiles over the stairs to the basement sagging down at least a foot.  A curtain of water danced across the kitchen, spoiling the food at the edge of the cabinet above the fridge and destroying a huge pile of homeschooling books that I keep on a small out of the way counter.  As I put down a towel I breathed a sigh of relief that at least it didn't reach my sewing machine.  Or so I thought.

Moving two boxes half filled with Christmas decorations we were in the process of taking down, I hoped that nothing had been destroyed and I watched the sagging tile and tried to decide what to do next as Paul tried to stop the water on the floor from coming down from the bathroom.

I tried to push the tile up with broom only to have the broom immediately break through.  As I turned to see what other damage was done I heard the giant tile snap in two as the ceiling caved in.

Sighing I darted past the debris and went down to the basement only to find that the water had continued to rush downwards through the ceiling and was streaming down onto the cabinet where I keep Patch and James' clothes and the clean linens. Everything was soaked in water that was now brown from coming down through the ceiling of a nearly 100 year old house.

The cleanup, which still isn't entirely done, dominated most of the weekend, but in the afternoon I took Maggie upstairs to take a bath.  Baths are her absolute favorite time of the day because it's the time when she can really "be a mermaid."

After an hour of playing I got her out, dried her off and she raced ahead of me to run downstairs to get dressed, with a towel wrapped around her shoulders.

These are the steps... she fell
from the first one that isn't turning to
the last one that isn't turning
at the bottom...
What happened next happened in slow motion.  She slipped on the top step on the straight part of our stairs.  I reached out to catch her and missed and she fell ten steps... all the way to the bottom of the hard wood, uncarpeted stairs, hitting every stair on her back on the way down.

I raced after her and as she reached the bottom she whimpered, jumped up and while I tried to check to see if she was injured, started to dance around the room... giggling.

Anyone who knows Maggie knows that she generally doesn't react normally to pain.  She often laughs when she's hurt.  I looked her over and other than some red marks on her back she seemed fine.  Thankfully she hadn't hit her head or neck.

After getting her into her pajamas and watching her dance around the room, and calling my dad who was an EMT for years and giving him the rundown on what had happened, I decided we'd narrowly avoided the ER.

The next event occurred on Sunday morning.  When Paul works nights he usually lets me sleep until seven and then he goes upstairs and goes to sleep.  He came up to wake me up and I started to pull my hair into a bun and throw on a pair of clogs.  Before I made it to the bottom of the stairs I heard Sadie yell that she didn't want to play that game, followed by hysterics.

I raced downstairs and found out that a certain three year old brother had gotten mad and hit her in the eye with the plastic toy syringe from the little toy doctor's kit.

Thankfully eyes heal fast.
Here she is the next day at the
optometrist.
After two and a half hours it wasn't getting better.  Her vision was blurry at first, now she couldn't open it.  And she was still crying.  So I called the pediatrician's office and they sent her straight to the pediatric emergency room in our town, where she was seen immediately and diagnosed with a corneal abrasion.

Which brings me up to last night when I sat down at my sewing machine to sew.  I'd moved it back upstairs and got it all set up and plugged it in.  And it was then that I saw the water stuck inside the screen of my beautiful Brother LB6800.  Apparently the water did reach it.

There may have been tears.

Okay.  There were tears.  That sewing machine is hugely important around here and I'm very skeptical it's going to come back from the computer being filled with water for four days.

So far Wednesday has been tame and I'm hoping things stay that way... unless we wake up tomorrow morning and discover that the winning Power Ball was sold in Michigan.  I'm totally okay with that sort of excitement... but otherwise I'm hoping for an absolutely boring week without any more surprises!

3 comments:

  1. awe hugs sweetie. I am so sorry about your bathroom and kitchen. :(

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh. My. Oh. Wow. Ok.... I have tears for you. Oh. I can't even imagine...how is your kitchen? You need to start a fund me thing for a new sewing machine.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Do you have any sort of back-up machine? Has it gone to a repair place yet?

    ReplyDelete

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