Are we there yet?

I am feeling so blah. I need to start packing but I just can't make myself start. The kids have been super whiny all day, with Harry being especially whiny this afternoon. Evan was pretty much running away from the physical therapist for the entire appointment this morning. I can tell that he needs a break as much as I do. I don't know what Harry's deal is but I suspect it is tooth number two popping up. My deal is undetermined at his moment. I just feel so blargh and nothing has been able to change that not even chocolate.

I am supposed to be at a church activity tonight but I don't want to go. We supposedly planned it at the marathon meeting on Sunday but there has been no follow up so it makes me even wonder why I tortured myself by even going. I think the whole Young Women's organization is in a big rut and we need something to shake us up. I think a lot of us are too busy thinking about summer right now. I know that I am just counting down the days to vacation. More later, Harry is pitching a fit.

later



After getting Harry into bed I crashed and now despite what the time stamp says it is the next day. I woke up at 4 am and I know I am going to be screwed sleep wise. At least I don't have anywhere I have to be today which is a nice change.

Happy Memorial Day

I hope that everyone had a nice holiday. We had a quiet celebration, sticking close to home. Awesome Dad had to get some studying done so he can take a test tomorrow. This test is another step that he needs to do to get his next promotion so we are crossing our fingers that he passes. Here are some photos from our dinner (we had steak and corn on the cob) Evan had his first taste of corn on the cob and loved it. He kept asking for more and more. He needed help from daddy though since it was too big to really eat with one hand.

Evan enjoying his first taste of corn on the cob

A boy and his cars

Evan is obsessed with cars, he has been this way since he was a small baby. He would flip all toys with wheels over and turn the wheels endlessly. Then when he was about nine months old he got his first small toy car and it has been love ever since. When we go walking he has to stop and watch each and every car pass by. Even if it is the biggest junker he will point and say "Wow!" He will often clutch a car in his hand to take with him in the car on our many errands. All he needs to be entertained is his cars.

I wonder if this car obsession will continue into adulthood. Will he be a teenager that loves to tinker with the old beater that he saved up for? Will he be an adult that loves and cherishes a sweet set of fast wheels? Will he become a car mechanic? I don't know but it sure is going to be interesting to find out.

Evan driving his cars with his daddy.

Evan's favorite race track. He has a strange need to drive his cars on elevated surfaces.

This is Evan playing with his car suit case. We keep the bulk of his collection in there and occasionally will pull it out to keep him entertained for a really long time.

Eeeewwww

I have discovered a down side to a child that will eat a large bowl of spinach. The downside: diapers that burn your nose hair and are disgustingly runny. Luckily after a nice meal of bananas I think we have turned the corner in the diaper department.

Both kids have been super grumpy this weekend. I think allergies are the culprit because when I dose them up with benedryl they are much less cranky. Of course this could also be because they sleep a lot while drugged up. I am even feeling a bit off too. This spring is apparently super bad this year for pollen because we had such a wet spring. Hopefully this will not last too long because I am wiped out.

I am counting down the days to my vacation. Unfortunately there is a whole host of things that need to get done before then. The packing alone is going to be staggering. Wish me luck!

Just a bit of nerdy fun

Your results:
You are Beverly Crusher

A good physician and a caring parent.
You are devoted to your children
and to your occupation.



Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test

Popeye

It is so much fun to see the joy that Harry takes in his food. He such an amazing eater, there has only been one food that he has refused. He did not seem to like avocado but that could have been because I used our baby food grinder to make it instead of using the blender. Today he ate a large bowl of spinach. Personally if it was me and someone was trying to spoon feed me some pureed spinach I would spit it in their face. Not Harry, he joyfully consumed the whole bowl.

Since he is such a big eater I am making more of the baby food myself. If I had to rely on the tiny jars that you can get from the store we would go through them at an astonishing rate. Harry can eat two of the stage two jars (3.5 ounces each) mixed with cereal (the cereal thickens it up and is a great filler) and an hour later he will want a four ounce bottle before bed.

It is going to be interesting to see how much he consumes when he is a teenager. My mother-in-law has filled my head with tales of the amazing quantities consumed by my husband when he hit his growth spurts. I have a feeling that I will be shopping at Costco more than I am right now.

It is check up time

Harry had his six month check up today. He weighs 18 pounds and is 26.5 inches long. He is average now, instead of the massive giant infant that he was a birth. I kind of expected that since we are average sized parents. I am still puzzled by the large birthweights of my children since there is no family connection for that.

Evan of course came along and totally freaked out when we had to go into the room where they weigh the kids. He then had another freak out in the examination room. He kept thinking that we were there for him to get shots. Eventually he figured out that Harry was the one getting the shots and then he relaxed a bit. As we were leaving I had to stop at the front desk to make another appointment for Harry and Evan wandered into the weight room. He then proceeded to throw a temper tantrum as I drug him out of the room that not a half hour ago made him freak out. Toddlers!!

While talking with the peditrician he asked me if I was over the whole overwhelming what the heck am I doing feeling that comes with being a parent. I had to laugh and tell him that even now that I am a bit more seasoned that I still have many of those moments and I am sure that I will have many more to come. Kids have a way of making you realize how much you don't know.

It's a good thing

Since the introduction of the fork the other day I have noticed that Evan has been a lot more interested in trying the things that we have for dinner. Generally during the day he eats kid friendly fare like chicken nuggets but at dinner time we insist that he trys what we are eating. He has to take one bite of every thing and then if he won't eat any more then too bad. Generally he takes the bite and that is that. No trying of food on his own. Lately though he has been eating a ton of dinner. He may not use the fork for the whole meal but he has been eating a good amount. Yeah Evan!

Just when you think that you know what is going on

Just when I thought that all we had to worry about surgery wise with Evan was the Fontan I find out that Evan's cardiologist is still considering a surgery. Supposedly the cath that he had in April was supposed to take this off of the table but it seems like she is still worried that the remaining flap of his ventricular wall will cause troubles in the future. I get the feeling that Evan's surgeon does not agree with her. We do have a compromise of sorts though. When Evan goes in for the Fontan he will go in and see how much of the wall is left. If there is a lot then he will take care of that and then we will schedule the Fontan for later. The reason for separating the surgeries is that the Fontan is a big operation for the body to get used to and bad things happen when more than the Fontan is attempted.

This whole thing is a bit frustrating because I feel like I am being yanked around. There is a certain amount of emotional preparation that you as a parent have to go through to get ready for a surgery. It is hard to prepare and then not have to go through the surgery and then have the surgery back out there for you to prepare for. It is going to be even harder to prepare for a surgery and then think that possibly you may be done only to be told that you still have to endure one more.

Another freaky thing is that we will not have to see the Cardiologist until Evan's pre-op check up. That means that a surgery date will be set soon. That means that the surgery is not some nebulous event that is out there is the distant future. It is closer and more defined as an event. It is coalescing into a cold hard event.

When I am older I am going to be bigger than you (a photo essay)

Pediactric Grand Rounds

Pediactric Grand Rounds is up and again yours truly made it in. Go over there and check out the interesting submissions.

A log in the tub

Harry passed an important milestone, one that you will not find in any baby book. He pooped in the bathtub for the very first time. I thought it was pretty funny but my husband was not as amused. He was the one that got to clean the bathtub while I wrangled the damp diaperless children. Luckily there were no futher out of diaper experiences and we got everyone back in the tub and clean.

Another potty related item of note is that Harry has not indulged in the time honored tradition of peeing on a parent. Not once has this kid let loose during a diaper change. Anyone that has changed a baby boy knows full well that they are very fond of squirting at inopportune times. One of Evan's nicknames was little squirt because he was very fond of giving anyone that changed his diaper a golden shower. He peed on the OB who took him out of the comfy womb (not that I entirely blame him for that one). That event set a precedence that continued until Evan was a bit older and had better bladder capacity.

Harry has been the good son in this regard. He whizzed on the OB and since then has not sprinkled anyone. I have brazenly left him undiapered for extended periods of time and not been sprinkled. I think that mentally I would feel a bit better if he had just gone ahead and gotten it over with. I know it is coming. No little boy can pass infantcy with out sprinkling at least one parent, so I hold my breath with each diaper change wondering if this will be it. Will today be the day?

Tagged again

Here we go again!

3 places I would like to visit:

1. Scotland, I have not so distant ancestors from there and it seems like a beautiful country.
2. Belize, I did a report on that country in the fifth grade and ever since I have wanted to visit there.
3. I think it would be fun to spend some time in the deep deep parts of the ocean.
   

3 People that I haven't seen in awhile but wish I could

1. I would like to see a few of my old high school friends. My ten year reunion is coming up (not that anyone has anything planned) and it would be nice to see how some of them turned out.
2. I would love to see the grandfather that I named Evan after again. I did not really get the chance to know him very well since he died when I was pretty young.
3. I would like to see my parents, my sisters, my sister and brother in law and my niece and nephew again and I will when we go on vacation in a few weeks

3 Things I would like to accomplish in the next three years

1. I would possibly like to have another baby, hoping to have a little girl that I can dress up in tons of cute dresses but will probably have another adorable boy.
2. I would like to have a final decision on if I will home school my kiddos or not
3. I want to get more control over my TV watching. I think that I watch too much junk. Of course I would never give up watching Lost.

I am not tagging any one specific, just the lame if you want to do this consider yourself tagged.

A trade (now with pictures)

One of my friends who was in the process of moving gave me this for Harry. Her daughter had long out grown it and she needed to get rid of stuff before the move. I took it, because as you know I can never say no to a fun baby gadget. That thing was a monstrosity. It took up so much space in our small living room. It was also too much fun, if that is possible. Evan was constantly harassing Harry every time I put the poor kid in it to play. Evan wanted to push the buttons too and would push Harry's hands away from the piano part every time he tried to play with his own toy. Sigh.

I was frustrated with this so I posted on a local kid stuff email group. I clearly stated in my email that I was looking to trade this for something along the lines of this. The response I got was not quite what I had anticipated. What I got was five people offering to SELL me their Exersaucers. The ones they wanted to sell me were very over priced to boot which I found very insulting. I do my research and I know my prices. I do not want your five year old Exersaucer that has been through a few kids and looks it. My item was in pristine condition and I knew that if I sold it I could get top dollar for it. Every time I got an email I wanted to email them back and ask them if they had flunked reading in school. I was nice though and simply deleted then.

Luckily I have a happy ending to this story. Someone contacted me wanting to trade, excited at her luck in finding my original email. Her baby had played with this at a friend's house so the baby's mother had bought her an older version of this (not being able to afford the more expensive toy) but the baby was not as fond of the different one and was not wanting to play in it. Now we are both happy. Harry is not as picky, the new one takes up much less space and it also has no musical lit component so Harry is left to play in peace. Although Evan will still come by now and then to "help" Harry play with his new toy.

Who would have thunk it?

Evan made an eating break through today. We had been allowing him to use a spoon with his meals for the last few weeks because he had shown actual interest in using it as a utensil rather than a fun toy. He had been doing ok with eating with a spoon, not super great and very messy. A couple of nights ago when we had spaghetti for dinner my husband mentioned that we should get him a fork to eat with.

I went to Target, got him an Elmo fork and spoon set (not my first choice but it was either that or Dora the Explorer) and this morning we let him try out the fork with a breakfast of french toast. He used it like a pro!!! I was very surprised that he knew how to use it so well. How the heck did he get to be such a big boy?? Where did my baby Evan disappear to? Who is this strange toddler Evan?

Fun with Coumadin

Because I was crazy busy last week I totally spaced testing Evan's INR. I do the test every other Friday at home. The machine is very much like a glucose monitor but it takes more blood to run the test. It is a great measure of the trust that Evan's Cardiologist has in me as a parent that I am able to do this at home instead of having to go into the office and have them do it.

Today Evan's numbers were high. This is something that has never happened before. They have come up low and I then will have flashes of Evan having another stroke. His medication will be adjusted upward and then the next test is usually fine. Evan's numbers being high presents a whole new problem. I have flashes of him tripping, falling and scraping his knee which then proceeds to bleed for a really long time. Or I have visions of being in a car accident and Evan being injured in a way that would not normally be fatal but because of his high numbers he bleeds out in an incredibly short amount of time.

Because of my overactive imagination we stayed at home in where things are padded. Evan was not happy about that. He loves being outside, looking at cars, going shopping and other things that do not involve staying at home all day. I hate that I have to feel this way, that I have to feel so protective of him. I know that things happen that are out of my control. I don't want to be overprotective of Evan and turn him into a creepy child that has no social skills and lives with his mother when he is 40. I want him to be able to grow up as a strong confident child..... a strong confident child that knows enough to take care of his health and will stay safe at home when his INR is too high.

Pictures from my Mother's Day

This is my present. I got a gardenia, hopefully I will not kill it. I already have one in our downstairs bathroom and it is hanging on... barely. This one will be outside and since it is not a specialty variety it may not be as touchy.

This is the hand made card that I got. By the way that is my husband's best penmanship so it is mostly legible. When he is not trying you can't read a thing he is writing, he would make a great doctor.

That is a picture of a car. Apparently Evan got tired of scribbling pretty fast so my husband did a bit of fill in work.

According to my husband Evan actually wrote that, well actually he held the crayon while my husband used Evan's hand to write out the names. I give the card an A+!

We got a single rose at church so I cut three other roses from my garden so the other rose would not feel lonely. They don't match but the ones from my garden smell wonderful.

This is a chocolate cupcake thingy that Evan made for me in nursery at church. By made I mean that he poked his finger into the frosting and tried to eat it while the nursery helpers did all the work.

Evan checking on dinner to make sure it is going well. My husband made me Chicken Cordon Bleu. It was very yummy.

Harry brightening my day by being cute.

Happy Mother's Day

This is my first Mother's Day with this blog so I decided to write a little bit about mothers.

I love being a mom. I haven't always liked being a mom but I have never really truly hated being a mother. Some days there is a lot of temper tantrums, winy kids and other naughtiness. Things are not always perfect, I will not lie to you. Despite the hard days it always seems like there is at least one short portion of the day when I feel so utterly thankful that God has sent these wonderful boys to be in our family.

I had a rough introduction to being a mother. Being told that your first born had a complicated and deadly heart defect is not something that a parent would ever want to hear. Helping my son through this has helped me see how I am a much stronger person that I had thought I was. It has given me a direction in my life that I had lacked. I want to go back to school when I can and become a pediactric nurse. I have seen the comfort that a good nurse can bring to a parent and I want to be able to do the same. One of Evan's nurses did this very same thing. Her daughter spent a lot of time in the hospital and is still needing extra care. This nurse was able to give me more of a been there done that perspective than any of the other nurses and for that I am thankful.

My own mother is an amazing person. She was raised by a divorced single mother back when that was looked down upon. She managed to work her way through college on her own and she was younger than most of her fellow students because she was smart enough to be skipped ahead a grade and then later on did two years of high school in one year. She later used the skills she had just learned to help put my father through school. She worked most of my life when she would have rather stayed at home. Teacher's don't make a lot of money so she made the sacrifices that allowed us to have the additional income that her four daughters needed.

Growing up I seemed to feel closer to my father since he was the one that was there for us after school. I think that really bothered my mother. The birth of Evan really changed all that for me because suddenly I knew how she felt about me. I knew the depth of the love that she had for me. One moment that really stands out to me is when I was talking to her on the phone while Evan was in the hospital. She said that she wished that she could go through this painful experience for me and I remember looking at my son and wishing I could go through this painful experience for him. That is a mother's love.

Dinner

For our new stove celebration dinner I whipped up a favorite of ours 20-Minute Chicken Parmesan. I only use two chicken breasts because we have a small skillet and we like having extra sauce for dipping the wonderful french bread that we get at a local grocery store. Pounding the chicken flat is actually very theraputic. Tonight I imagined that I was pounding my husband flat instead of the chicken (ha ha just kidding............... NOT!). I bought a meat mallet just for this recipe since we have never really felt the need for flat meat before. If hubbie dosen't shape up soon I may think about using it on him.

You Are a Cherry Jelly Bean

Sweet yet strong, you have a distinct personality without being a weirdo. You're the most normal of all flavors - but you're never boring.

What Flavor Jelly Bean Are You?

We finally have an oven!!!!

After two weeks without an oven we finally had it installed this morning. I am so glad that we can bake and cook stuff on the stove top!

On an unrelated note, my huband is just TODAY realizing that Mother's Day is on Sunday. Grrr!!!!! I have had his Father's Day present for months now and I managed to purchase it while I had both kids with me. Imagine that, having one or both kids with you does not prevent you from being able to go out to a store and buy something. Having kids does not automatically mean that you have to stay at home. We have extra car seats so he can't even use that as an excuse. I don't even expect all that much. He could have had Evan scribble on a piece of paper and then written "Happy Mother's Day" on it and I would have been happy.

Bleh

I have been feeling very stressed out lately. I have been really trying to pack too much into my day and it shows. I hate feeling rushed and needing to be somewhere or doing something all day. I need to have down time and so do the kids. Yesterday at physical therapy Evan was very grumpy and was wanting to just run around because much of Tuesday he was in the car with me while I was running errands.

One thing I know that I will be cutting out is the Spouse's Association. I can't take it any more. The reason there was no one there on Tuesday was because I came early. My stressed out mind made me go at the wrong time. I hardly go to any of the activities that they put on because they are generally on base and that is a long drive to do things that I can do here in my own town. I only went because I felt I should. I could do a whole post on how some women think that they play an important role in how their husband does in making rank. I was sort of subliminally buying into that but now I have just decided that it is not worth the effort since it doesn't really matter any way. My husband is doing just fine without me.

I am not too sure what else I can cut out of my life. One thing that would free up a ton of time is not going to physical therapy for Evan but that is not exactly something I can do and still feel like I am a decent mother. He has a gimpy arm and really needs the therapy badly if he has any chance at regaining any use of it.

What I really have been wanting to do all week is go shopping. I want to buy myself a few dressy tops for church. I only have two and one is long sleeved so it is getting too hot to wear now. I hate that the majority of my wardrobe is tshirts and jeans. I am also toying around with the idea of getting shorts for the summer but I hate showing off my horribly white legs. Shorts would also mean that I have to shave on a semi regular basis. I may just get long skirts which will cover the casper legs and still be cooler than wearing pants. I just haven't had the time I need to even go looking. These are things that I can't just pick up at Target. It will require a heavy duty all day search, possibly several days of heavy duty shopping. I think that I may possibly do this shopping when we go on our vacation in June. I will have more of a selection and I will have babysitters so I can actually try things on.

I guess the whole point of this post is that I need a vacation. Bad! Of course it will not be as exciting as I had planned since just last week my mother fell off her bike and cracked her pelvis and her left elbow. The next day my sister E was running on wet grass slipped and snapped her ankle. Sadly those two are the main people that I leave the kids with when I am there visiting. They should be more mobile when we arrive but they both had to take sick leave and vacation time for this, so they will not have as much free time when we come. The main thing that is important is that they have both promised that they can watch the kids for our fifth anniversary celebration. My husband and I will be leaving the kids for a few days and having a romantic getaway. Where? I am still trying to figure that one out but we will be getting out come hell or high water. I think I am going to include a massage for me and some pampering.

I have had one crazy day!

I am tired!!! I have been running around all day doing one thing or another. A lot of it was because I had signed up to bring the snack for the Spouse's Association meeting that was supposed to be tonight. I rush to get everything together, drive the long drive out there and then wait for someone to show up. No one came, so I thought maybe I had the date wrong or something. I get home and check my schedule and yep I had the right day. I had even emailed the president about the location of the meeting. I just emailed the president but I am rather ticked off about the whole thing. Now I have a crapload of fruit in the fridge and some Diet Coke which no one in my house drinks (I figure if I am gonna drink bad stuff I may as well have it taste good). *sigh* I need to go to bed.

Week 1 Without A Stove

Well we have made it one week without a stove. I am not very happy about it but we made it. Sadly the end is not in sight because the (insert bad word here) company that is supposed to install the stove that the owner so quickly purchased has not even attempted to contact us. My husband of course tried to pass the buck to me about calling them but I have been so busy that I have been unable to do this. The buck has been passed back to him since he actually gets a lunch hour during which he can do things like this.

I miss my stove terribly. Microwaving just does not achieve the same results. Not having my oven means that we are eating more processed foods than I like. It also means no pasta, which is a staple in our diet. It means that I have to give Evan soggy chicken nuggets instead of crispy. Harry has been unaffected by this only because all it takes to make his food is warm tap water. I wish things were as simple as that for us.

Hopefully my husband knocking a few heads around today will be sufficient to get the ball moving because otherwise I am going to start getting very cranky. They do not want to deal with a cranky Awesome Mom.

Pediacrtic Grand Rounds

I have recently stumbled upon some great blogs written by peditricans. They do a collection of posts called grand rounds where people that are in the medical community (parents included) submit blog posts about whatever medical issue is on their minds. My post about Evan's feeding difficulties made it in. Go check it out by clicking the link in the title of my post. They always have very interesting reading.

Childhood Stroke Awareness Day

I just thought that I would share that today is Childhood Stroke Awareness Day. This is something that is very near and dear to my heart. Here is a very good website to educate yourself on this issue. Evan has hemiplegia as a result of his stroke. This is a very good online support group for parents of kids with this.

Feeding Your Child

Back in the days when I was pregnant and my head was filled with all the joys of my upcoming birth I never questioned that I would be able to blissfully feed my infant into the appropriate chubbiness that is expected of a baby. Babies eat, it was as simple as that in my hormonally clouded mind.

Then I gave birth to Evan. He had a rough start in life and was not actually given any food for the first four days of his life. An IV prevented dehydration but the doctor was wary of feeding him because of the possibility that there may not be sufficient blood flow to his bowels causing the food to possibly make bad things happen in an already uncertain situation. This simple decision added to reflux and a heart that had to work harder than a normal one (ever try eating food while exercising? It is hard) led to a baby that did not like to eat and didn't really ever feel hungry.

It was devastating for me. I didn't see the heart defect so it really was easy to pretend that he was a normal child but the eating issues smacked me in the face every few hours. I felt like a horrible mother because my son would not eat the way that a normal child would. I had to cram a NG tube down his throat every night to make up for the nutrition that he would not eat during the day. I would not give him tube feeds during the day because that meant that he would have had the tube in at times when other people could see him and wonder why he was different. I wanted him to be normal and I went the extra mile to pretend that he was.

Feeding him in public always sent me into a tizzy. Evan had to have his bottles warm, so I not only had to deal with that but I also had to deal with him puking at the drop of a hat. It was very difficult to say the least and I often ended up having to go home from church to change my clothing.

Adding to my woes was an awful GI doctor that was no help at all. He seemed to barely speak English, I wondered if he even understood what I was trying to tell him. He ran a grand total of one test (an emptying scan to see if Evan was digesting food properly) and then told me that Evan's pacemaker placement was causing the problem because it was right over his stomach. He had me come all the way down to the city several times for weight checks, never even considering what a hardship it was for us. Each visit was a huge interruption to Evan's feeding schedule.

I kept desperately looking for the magical cure to the problem. I latched on to the pacemaker theory only to have that squashed soundly when it was later moved to the other side and his eating had not improved one bit. Many well meaning people even suggested cutting out the night feeds, thinking that getting food all night was hampering his ability to feel hunger during the day. I had tried that many times only to have to endure a cranky baby that ate even less than before. Every time I read about a parent trying a new thing to get their child to eat I was filled with hope and giddy to try it myself. Each time I had my hopes dashed.

After Evan had his stroke I took it on myself to stop all of his GI medications. I just wanted to see how much they were helping. Once I stopped them he suddenly stopped throwing up as much. After his first birthday he started throwing up during his night feeds and that was a signal to me that it was time to stop fighting the g-tube. Shortly before the surgery I also consulted with a dietician (which I had to pay out of pocket for since my insurance did not cover it) and got a lot of ideas on things to feed Evan. I also had an appointment with the GI nurse practicioner and she gave me the practical advice that I had been looking for from the GI doctor.

Letting Evan choose how much to eat, giving him calorie dense foods and stretching a stomach that had been previously used to only small amounts of food has really paid off. Things have gotten so much better and it is looking like this horrible journey is almost over. I certainly do not ever take it for granted when I watch Harry suck down a bottle or eagerly look for the next bite of his baby mush. I soak up the comments on how big Evan has gotten and how good he looks. I will also never ever give unasked for advice about feeding a child because they can be quite hurtful even if they are not designed to be. A listening ear is what I offer.

A Week Without A Stove

Saturday we had a dramatic event occur. My husband was preparing dinner (how nice of him) and he went to turn on the oven. I was at the computer and I heart a pop and a whoosh and saw a flash of light out of the corner of my eye. That combination of events is never a good thing so I rush over to see what is going on. The oven had shorted out for unknown reasons possibly because it was built in the 70s. Never one to leave well enough alone my husband reset the circuit and then promptly turned on the oven again this time shorting out all the power in the house. Brilliant huh?

Luckily we are renting so this was not our problem. We called the owner and left the problem on her. After consulting with my husband she decided just to replace the stove. This is something that I have been wanting for some time, so I am thrilled that this happened. It seems a bit crazy that it happened so soon after we got out new fridge.

The only big bummer is that the stove will not be able to be installed until sometime next week. It is harder than I thought at first to do without a stove. We normally use it every night for dinner and I use it a lot for lunch for Evan. We are having to rely on our crock pot and other small kitchen appliances to get dinner done. Luckily the weather is nice so we can grill outside as well. I hope that this is all worth the joy of a band spanking new stove.

Some messy baby pictures for your enjoyment