Helluva day

Yesterday was a day, that no matter how much we might like, we aren't going to forget anytime soon.  I shall recap.

My day started with catching Robert in a lie.  This, sadly, is absolutely nothing new.  It has become extreme...lying is more natural to him than telling the truth, and as a parent that scares me.  As the day progressed and I was doing some digging into his lie, I found even more deceptions.  I called Andrew to ask him if he would make sure he was here when Robert got off the bus so we could discuss it with him together.  While I was on the phone with Andrew, I received a call from the realtor that while closing was originally supposed to be yesterday, the loan processing had hit a snag.  Remember when I said this particular offer carried more risk?  Yepper.  Fortunately, this snag is able to over come, but it is delaying the process and is also going to cost us about $1000.

As Andrew walked in the door yesterday, he was on his cell phone with his dad.  Andrew's mother had been taken to the local hospital and was being admitted for severe abdominal pain.  The "good news" is that she was only a few rooms away from Andrew's brother who has been in the hospital over a month recovering and rehabbing from a stroke he suffered the day after my father passed away.  It paralyzed the left side of his body, but fortunately he is making progress.  It appears as though my mother-in-law is suffering from a severe kidney infection which required them to go in and attempt to drain the infection, and she also has a kidney stone.

When Robert arrived home, we had a talk, and I honestly felt the situation went as well as it could be expected as that point.  He basically understands that we simply have zero tolerance for lying, and he has to figure out a way to start telling the truth.  He also understands that he has a long road to go in building trust with us again.

I made a quick dinner of spaghetti because we had some other issues to deal with.  I really wanted to do laundry, especially since Thomas had been sick (he stayed home from school yesterday), but our washer had stopped working Friday.  I called the people who had been out to repair it Friday (they fixed it, but after two loads Friday evening it stopped working again) and they gave me some suggestions I might try that wouldn't require them coming out again.  Andrew started to disconnect the hoses right before dinner, during which Catherine had such a tantrum over being asked to feed the cats that she picked up her stoneware dinner plate of spaghetti and through it across the room, smashing it in to many pieces, but fortunately not hurting anyone or anything else.  We informed her that she was going to clean it up which included mopping the floor, and this sent her spiraling into a further tantrum.  She did this often as a child, but we rarely see this behavior anymore.  Because we were so focused on dealing with that, Andrew forgot about the washing machine.  This would not have been a big deal except that when he went back it after we put the kids to bed, we realized that the water to the hoses had not been turned completely off, and therefore we now had standing water in the laundry room.  Awesome.  We started cleaning that up and I crawled back behind the washer in an attempt to implement some of the suggestions we were given to fix the washer.  As I was there, I noticed that I heard dripping in the sunroom.  Andrew went to investigate, and sure enough, it seems as though we had an ice jam and water was leaking into the sunroom through the door.  We had another little flood in there.  Fortunately the room has a tiled floor, but we still had things to clean up in there as well...and we still hadn't finished the laundry room!  Andrew went up on the roof to try to clear and clean things (at 9:30!), and I stayed inside to work on clean up. 

It was nearly 11:00 when Andrew and I finally sat down last evening to relax with a glass of wine.  We both agreed it was a VERY long and trying day, but we also know that most of this was short term stress and that overall life is still pretty good.  Still, given the way things had gone, it seemed only fitting that Andrew broke a wine glass as he was turning off the lights in the family room to go to bed!