Going Swimmingly

First off, for those of you out of state that heard about the tornadoes in Arkansas yesterday, Russellville was spared from any major issues. However, Atkins (which is 10 miles down the road) did get hit with one, which is closer than normal for around here. Please keep those people in your thoughts and prayers.

On the Weather Channel, they were asking an Arkansas spokesperson if Arkansans were surprised they were dealing with tornadoes instead of icing. (Set aside the fact that we hardly get any of the latter.) The guy’s response, basically, was “we’ve had a tornado earlier in the year already, major straight line winds recently, icing and snow the week before. We pretty much not surprised by anything.” That’s Arkansas weather for you.

Things are going well around the house. Sarah’s off and crawling. She started out with a slightly strange hitch in her crawl, trying to put her leg straight out like she was partly standing. She seems to be in the more traditional form now and moving around quite well. And, hopefully, she’s healthy. After the round of antibiotics, she was fine until last Saturday, when she started running fever. She got up to 103 on Sunday, but we kept with the Tylenol/Motrin combo and it seems to have worked. She’s missed two Sundays at Wesley in a row now, something her adopted church grandparents are not too happy about!

Meron has this song that she sings to Sarah, especially if she’s fussing when she is trying to go to sleep. It goes:

“Mommy loves her little Sarah
Mommy loves her little girl
Mommy loves her little Sarah
Her beautiful, beautiful girl.”

Usually that settles her down, but not always. However, lately Benjamin has started singing it (or at least the first line over and over), replacing Mommy with his name. That never seems to fail to calm Sarah down. Might not get her to sleep, but at least she won’t be screaming at the top of her lungs.

It’s not that surprising, though. Sarah seems to think her brother is the greatest and funniest thing out there. She doesn’t laugh at anyone as much as she does him. Hopefully that’ll continue throughout life.

So you could say things are going swimmingly. That was almost literally accurate Sunday night.

After getting back from our yearly Sunday School Super Bowl party, I got the kids to bed then loaded the dishwasher. Since our garbage disposal in the sink tends to clog, I got under the sink and went to unclog it as I often do.

However, when I opened up underneath the sink, I found wet boxes and bottles. As I started taking things out, I saw a small lake. It was so waterlogged that the floor of the sink cabinet appears to have sunk in.

I cleaned things up the best I could but I wasn’t able to turn off the water, so I put a bucket under the sink and hoped for the best. After all, by this time it was close to 11:30 at night and it didn’t seem to be worth paying overtime for.

The next morning, I called the plumber. He got there quickly and it turned out it really just needed a new faucet. We even got a sprayer that we’ve been lacking since we moved into the house. And it wasn’t nearly as expensive as I was afraid of when I saw the river of water leaking out on the floor that morning.

That’s the big stuff from around here, at least right now. Poker this weekend, so I’m sure I’ll wrap it up later on as well.