Nothing personal

While Rachel and Miriam have been "across the pond," we've been having a fine time here at home.

On Monday morning last week, Zoë came home from swim team practice and immediately began making cookies. She's determined to learn how to bake...and whipped up some delicious oatmeal raisin cookies...while wearing an apron over her still-damp swimming suit. 

She also made some bread this past week, and although tears were shed and she had to scrap her first attempt her second attempt turned out fabulous!

All the kids probably did more helping with things like dinner and dishes than they have ever had to do!

*****

Our game of the week was "Ticket to Ride" and Zoë and Benjamin certainly became forces to be reckoned with. Alexander...also played...and I'm sure he'll develop a more competitive strategy as soon as he can identify Helena on the board.

Last night's game was particularly tricky. Alexander was being a chaos agent—he abandoned his routes (because he couldn't find Helena) and was just building trains in random places on the board and messing everyone up. Zoë and Benjamin were feeling rather serious about completing their routes. 

At one point Benjamin thought I had cut him off and started getting quite upset about it. 

"Chill out. It's nothing person...WHAAAAT?!!!?!" Andrew began calmly before losing his own cool when Benjamin built right where Andrew was planning on building on his next turn. 

That made the kids all laugh. 

"Geez, Dad—simmer down. It's nothing personal," they said patronizingly to him. 

In the end, it was Benjamin (and Andrew) who ended up preventing me from finishing up one of my routes (Benjamin found an alternative path and was fine but my desired destination was completely blocked off).

*****

In all of the helping that the children did, Alexander ended up dropping a pitcher of water on the floor Saturday evening, which flowed underneath the fridge, requiring us to move the fridge to mop up the mess (although I wouldn't consider water messy per se...it's also not something we want to leave sitting on our hardwood floor).

When we moved the fridge, our water connection (circa 1983) gave up the ghost and water started spraying all over the place...which was a super-duper fun surprise. We got it down to a dribble and Andrew headed to the hardware store to see if he could find the same connector piece so he could replace it, but apparently they don't make them anymore (because of those updated building codes). He found a similar piece he thought might work but he couldn't take off the original piece because it was too corroded. So...we just kept a pitcher under it until today.

The plumber arrived this morning and said that our connection wasn't to code anymore (of course) and he would have to update it (of course). To be fair, our connection was a thin little pipe, about as thick as a pencil, just...sticking up out of the floor. So now we have a...regular-size...water pipe running up in our wall to an "ice maker outlet box" that has a shut-off valve (with another shut-off valve where they tapped into the water pipes in the basement). 

When I wrote out the check to pay the plumber I wrote $13,000 instead of $1,300...so I shredded that check and wrote out a new one for $1,300. That was still more money than we wanted to spend today, but much better than $13,000.

*****

Rachel and Miriam are on their way home after a grand adventure catching their flight this morning. We're excited to have them back!!