Monkey Business

This week has been a hum...

DINGER!

Allow me to begin with the ER trip on Monday. Ye Olde 10 month old took a tumble and "bonked uh nog!" as the toddler fella would say and had some brief neuro changes. It was all my fault (*beats breast, shouts "Mea CULPA!") . I normally keep one hand on him at all times when he's on the changing table but was trying to shove a particularly bulky diaper into the pail and took my hand off for a brief second when he crashed. Oh, the guilt! Long and expensive story made short, no skull fracture, no bleeds. To quote the ER Doc, "He just got his bell rung pretty good". Ugh. I want to throw up just thinking about it. 

Now, fast forward to Friday night... I am most exhausted from the wild week(where everybody under 3 cried in unison for no discernible reason ALL WEEK LONG) but Ben and I swear to each other that come hell or high water, we WILL do our p90x workout. We feed, bathe and put the wild boys to bed. Aengus wakes up and I nurse him a little longer while Ben runs downstairs to set up the dvd. I put Aengus to bed and then run downstairs to workout. Ben stops 

me at the foot of the stairs and says "Katy, we've got a BIG problem." and all I can think of was "Oh CRAP! Did Declan throw a weight through the tv again?!?"  

Shame on Mama. He wouldn't dare!

... And then I smelled it. 

Apparently there was a blockage somewhere in the plumbing and raw sewage backed up into the downstairs bathroom... and bedroom... and into the drywall. You see where this is going? It's bad. Thankfully, we are renting so our landlords are handling it. Sadly, we are friends with our landlords so we feel extra terrible that this happened while we were living here. It ruined an old mattress of ours but that mattress needed replacing anyway. This house is having to have carpet, baseboards, drywall and a vanity removed. 

This whole mess has made Ben extra nervous about buying a house sometime in the not so distant future. He's rented his entire adult life except the first 2 years of our marriage when we paid a mortgage on the house I bought before I met him. I HATE renting, though. It makes me all hive-y and itchy. All I can hear is my dad's voice saying "You're throwing money down the drain when you rent!" every time I write the rent check. I miss being a homeowner and feeling invested in where I live. I miss having a garden and planting perennials (which get bigger and better every year!). I miss diy home improvement and painting a  back bedroom just the right shade of green to make someone I love feel content and welcome when they're in it. But mostly, it's the garden. 

I am my father's daughter and it is NEVER more apparent than during Lent when I peruse greenhouses and seed catalogs daydreaming of summer's vivid bounty. I scoop up seedlings and packets of zinnias and get all fired up about Good Friday (That's the day you're supposed to put out your garden, don't you know!). I stick my nose in a potted rose bush and wonder about whether or not the blooms were fragrant enough to waft into the house if I planted her beneath an open window. 

Last year we lived in a town home with no outdoor greenspace so in terms of Spring planting, it was a bust. This year we have a deck and a big yard and I'm getting the boys in on the action...

I think it's a winner.