To top it off

I have to recount to you 24 hours that I experienced starting around 9:00 on Sunday night and ending around 9:00 last night.

Hope woke up at 9:00 Sunday night, crying. I put her back to sleep and she was then up every 20 to 30 minutes until 2:00 a.m. You read that right, people... every 20 to 30 minutes. She wasn't teething (not obviously anyway) and she didn't have a fever.... she was just wanting to breastfeed, well, suckle actually. So, at 1:30 a.m. John took her to the basement to see if after a bit of crying she'd go to sleep as she has done before. At 2:30 or so, he came back upstairs after one full hour of bloodcurdling screams. I heard them all from our bedroom where I laid awake. I just can't sleep through her cries. It's a mum thing.

I fed her again. In the midst of this feed, I started stretching my neck. If any of you out there are breastfeeders, you'll know why. You get really tight shoulders and neck from breastfeeding. So, I'm stretching away and then something pops in my neck. Crap - I couldn't turn my head to the right without a lot of pain. Hope went back to bed and I uncomfortably did too. She was awake again at 5:00 and back down quickly. Awake again at 7:00 and then slept again until 8:30.

We're all getting ready for the day. I'm in the shower when the smoke alarm goes off on the top floor. Emily starts getting pretty frantic - I don't blame her as it was ear-piercing. We have two smoke alarms up there. One is wired into the house. The other is battery operated. We installed the battery operated one because I don't like the wired-in type. They could easily fail if your electricity is down, like when your house is on fire. Okay, so I jump out of the shower and run into the hall and determine it is the wired-in one that is going off. Naked and sopping wet I run down the stairs to the main floor and into the kitchen (saying hi to the reams of people walking by on the path at the end of our yard). No smoke. Check the basement. No smoke. I ran back upstairs and grabbed the step ladder out of Hope's room (don't ask me why it's in there, but I was really glad it was). Keep in mind that my ears are totally ringing by this point. Emily and Hope are taking it surprisingly well. I climb up and rip off the cover and pull out the wires. I untwist the caps pulling at the same time so that they become disconnected. Smoke alarm stops. It dawns on me at this point that I just disconnected live wires (bad enough) while I am soaking wet.

Next, my neck is killing me all day so I get to the chiropractor and get all fixed up. Dinner not made so John starts cooking when we get home, a nice veggie stirfry validating my successful attempts of late to eat more vegetarian meals.

Finally, dinner is ready at 6 at which point John tells me he kind of screwed up the rice. Let me just interject here to say that John is a great cook... better than me most times even. However. The rice came out crunchy. He realized he used a one to one ration instead of one to two. But, he figures he saved it by letting the saucy stirfry sit ontop of the bed of rice for a while. So, we dig in. What hits my mouth is one of the most vinegary and cruncy (not the veggies) stirfries I've had.

John starts laughing. Laughing so hard that there are tears rolling down his cheeks. He says: "I was just thinking about your day..... and.... after being up all night, hurting your neck, almost frying yourself naked.... then I serve you a dinner that tastes like urine."