Boiling Point

As I mentioned in my previous post, things have not been going exactly smoothly around here of late. Between the new teeth, recovering from colds, and determining our next course of action with the sleeping arrangements, we're just finally getting back to somewhat normal sleep... finally.



Because I got a decent (good even for recent days) amount of sleep last night, I just couldn't figure out why this afternoon was going so horribly. I mean, the morning went fine, and then the littles got a good 2 hour nap. Ella p-tended to rest for about 30 minutes but stayed in her room for most of the full hour mandatory quite time.



I'll admit that a big part of the downhill swing in moods was the fact that I was working on our supper meal for the better part of the afternoon. It was one of those things where I had started before calculating how long it would take and then before I knew it ,I was too far into it to stop. As a result, the girls were all four up and whirling furiously in snotty circles around me while I was trying to cook- never a good situation.



At one point I noticed from the kitchen that Ella was dragging their little tykes slide from the living room into the office. Maggie was hot on her trail, and a more than willing accomplice. No big deal, I thought, grateful that they were out of the kitchen. They are just going to play with it in somewhere else, I told myself. I then heard Ella tell Maggie, "do not touch the timer when Mom is looking" while standing under our digital thermostat that is mounted about 5 feet up our office wall.



When I looked in to see exactly what was going on, Maggie was standing at the top of the slide reaching for the thermostat. I removed her from the top, pulled the slide back into the living room where it belongs, and instructed them both to refrain from doing anything further that could get them into trouble. Here's where I made my second big mistake of the afternoon: I failed to verify that they hadn't adjusted the thermostat.



Flash forward several hours: We've had several people over to help. Morgan and Hannah, our 9 and 12 year old neighbors had stopped by after school for a while. Kelli was here after a long day working at school; she was a sight for sore eyes. The girls all clung to her like they hadn't seen her in weeks, not the mere days it had actually been. She delivered a critical yet overlooked ingredient to the dinner I was making. She wasn't feeling too well, and sat down under the fan in the living room while the girls played around her. Nanny and Pop C stopped by to deliver some super cute little aprons that Nanny made for the girls while we were eating supper. They didn't stay very long, partly because it was so darn hot in here. I just thought the kitchen was hot because that was the only room I was in, and the stove had been on all afternoon. Donna was here afterwards, as usual, to help with the evening routine. She stayed her normal amount of time, but I noticed that shortly after she arrived she had to trade out her sweater set for a short sleeved top.



I bet you can already tell where this is going. After we got the girls ready for bed... they were sweating all the while, and read a few books, and I put them to bed, I realized that it was incredibly hot throughout the house, not just in the kitchen. I was about to loose my cool with Ella who was playing the part of Jack-in-the box after being put to bed, when on my third trip down the hall to see what she was yelling about, I happened to look at the thermostat. It was reading 81 degrees!! Good grief, no wonder everyone was pouring with sweat, the older folks thought they were having hot flashes, the girls were going nuts, and I was at my wits end.



It turns out that Maggie or Ella, I'm not sure which one, moved the controls from cool to heat much earlier in the afternoon while they were playing on the slide. Whew, all those hot flashes and my short fuse could have been avoided it I'd 1- planned better for meal preparations today, and 2- just looked at the thermostat after I removed Maggie and Ella from the slide. Simple!



I was so relieved when I realized what a simple fix it was that I said a little prayer. 'Thank you God that we're not having trouble with our air conditioning!" And as Maggie says at the end of every song, book, and statement: AMEN!