When It Rains…

Wow! Three entries in one day – can you stand it?

Anyway. Earlier this evening Carrie and I were sitting on the couch together watching one of her Signing Times videos while Denis was working on dinner. In fact, in a weird coincidence we were watching the Silly Pizza Song segment while he was making homemade pizza! Denis calmly asked from the kitchen, “is it a bad thing if the oven’s on fire?” Um… I scooped Carrie up, took a peek in the kitchen, saw the bright yellow flames in the oven, and advised him to turn it off (duh!) and close the door, hoping that it would burn itself out. Meanwhile, I threw on my shoes and went and stood outside the front door with Carrie so she wouldn’t be treated to all the lovely smoke invading the house. The flames went out pretty quickly, and I brought Carrie over to my parents’ house so I could help Denis open up the house and get the smoke under control.

So, there we are, running around the house, when the power takes several hits. The dogs start going berserk, I start worrying that somehow the fire had re-ignited and caused the oven (it’s electric) to trip the circuit breaker, the UPS upstairs starts frantically beeping…I run back next door, the power’s out there too.

At this point we have an uncooked pizza, a stove we can’t use for various reasons, smoke filling the entire downstairs, no electricity for fans, it’s dinnertime for Carrie and we can’t microwave her frozen purees, and the dogs are going nuts because of the beeping and the distant thunder.

It ended up working out though. Denis grilled the pizza – it actually came out quite well that way – my mom and I thawed Carrie’s food in very hot water, and just as Carrie was starting to get really tired the power came back on. Even without the fans, the smoke had pretty much dissipated by the time I brought her home, and she got to bed at a reasonable hour.

And now I need a break. What a way to start the week!

Done.

I just finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I don’t want to give anything away, so I’m just going to say that I’m very sad. It was a good book, but not a happy one.

One more book to go before we find out how it all ends.

That Was Too Easy

Last night wasn’t such a good night for Carrie. She woke up around midnight, and no amount of rocking, diaper changing or nursing was working to get her back to sleep. Denis even tried rocking her for a while, and then we finally gave up and brought her to bed just so we could get some sleep. Only, that backfired, because Carrie was thrashing and crying and kicking instead of sleeping. Finally, at 1:30 I was so frustrated I carried her back to her room, put her in her crib, gave her a kiss and said goodnight. I crawled back in bed, listening to her protests, fully expecting to have to get up in 10 minutes to go rescue her. But after only a minute or two, she stopped crying and started playing with her aquarium, and then I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew it was 6 AM.

I felt horribly guilty, imaging that I must have slept through her crying alone in her crib, but on a whim I put her down awake for her morning nap instead of spending 20 minutes rocking her to sleep, and 20 minutes later she had fallen asleep on her own! Dare I hope for a repeat for her afternoon nap?