Something fierce

First, everything is fine. I know I have been pretty good about posting at least every other week, so missing two Sundays in a row has worried some people. Fortunately, the worst that is going on around here is that I am completely losing track of time due to busyness. I keep telling Jeff that I'm going to be less busy "next week," and unfortunately next week never seems to arrive even though it's been a few weeks. But I swear that starting on Wednesday I'm going to be less busy. Unless a bunch of unexpected stuff comes up like has been happening at work the last few weeks :-)

We had an amazing Halloween with tons of decorations, so many trick-or-treaters we couldn't keep count (probably around 200 according to one estimate, based on the amount of candy that we purchased and ran out of). It was Maren's first Halloween as a trick-or-treater. She absolutely loved it. And it turns out she also loves chocolate, which we have been avoiding giving her but the jig is up.

Sadly, I don't have many pictures from Halloween. Jeff tried to take a few but I don't have those. This is kind of the best I have:

I don't know why it is coming up sideways, and I don't know how to fix it, so there it is. Maren is not wearing a shirt in this photo because she peed on it. I feel like only parents who have had toddlers can understand how she managed to pee on her shirt but not her pants (hint: it has to do with spending a lot of time wearing no pants).

Maren is absolutely hilarious lately. She has started using phrases that she hears other people use, and repeating things that other people have said. Jeff sent me a text yesterday after Maren told him that another child at daycare "Was crying something fierce." I am 100% certain that neither Jeff nor I has ever used that phrase. It is hard not to laugh.

So in the last two weeks we went from fall to winter. About a week and a half ago Jeff was raking leaves, and then yesterday and the day before Jeff and Maren went sledding. It was a very abrupt transition, but at least there was no wishy-washy time when we were unable to say whether it was fall or winter. On October 31 it was fall, then it snowed overnight and on November 1 it was winter. Life in Saskatchewan.

Breathing easy

Our house smells normal. It is such a relief to have the sewer fixed, and to know that the problem has been identified and solved. Sometimes these problems involve a lot of trial and error, fixing many smaller issues with plumbing until something finally works. But fortunately for us, we have a pretty knowledgeable plumber who figured it out fairly quickly. And it is nice to appreciate good smelling air, which we would not have thought about if we had not had this problem.

We also had new blinds installed in our bedrooms yesterday. We were using cardboard in the windows to block the light in Maren's room, but no more. It feels like such a luxury (and really, it is in many ways) to just close the blinds instead of doing a complicated cardboard/blanket-stuffing maneuver every night. Slowly but surely, the house is shaping into our home.

Maren has been loving Halloween. Parts of her temperament definitely come from Jeff - she is totally unfazed by things that would have scared me to pieces when I was little. She has been playing a ton with a severed hand, and the other day she spent about 10 minutes straight running back and forth past a motion-activated demon.

She is most definitely her father's daughter :)

Sewer

We have a likely culprit and likely fix for our sewer smell problem, and unfortunately it is not great news. We most likely have a crack in a six foot section of sewer pipe that was not updated when the rest of the sewer system was replaced, probably in the 80s. 

This section of pipe will require jackhammering of basement concrete to remove and replace. We have the work scheduled for Thursday, but until then, the smell is getting worse. 

The smell is coming up from the basement through the furnaces. We have two - one that heats the upstairs, and one that heats the downstairs. This is very common here, with our bitter cold winters. We had only been smelling the smell upstairs, so assumed it was somehow related to plumbing upstairs. But the source of the leak is right next to the upstairs furnace, so sewer gas was getting sucked right into it and coming out through the heat vents. At one point I was sure the smell was getting worse when we had the windows open, and it turned out I was right. 

So the build up of sewer gas in the basement has gotten worse, and yesterday morning we started smelling it from the downstairs heat vents. We decided to stop using the furnaces to heat the house, despite low temperatures of around 15F/-11C. We are using space heaters, and have had a fire going in the fireplace all weekend. 

We have absolutely no sewer smell with this arrangement, but we are not sure how to manage the three weekdays between now and Thursday. We can't very well keep a fire going when we aren't here during the day. Fortunately there is warmer weather in the forecast (high tomorrow 60F/16C, Tuesday 70F/21C), so hopefully we can manage all right until Thursday!

Thanksgiving

This past weekend, including today, is Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. We were fortunate to have Jeff's sister, her partner, and their four-year-old daughter visiting us for the long weekend.

With a two-year-old and a four-year-old in the house, there are many lessons to be learned about sharing. But aside from sharing-related meltdowns, Maren loved having her cousin around. They played together, coloured pictures together, and listened to stories together.

This morning we even discovered that they have matching hoodies.

We were sad to see them leave this morning, but happy to have had the visit. We are looking forward to going to Calgary in early/mid December for the three cousins on Jeff's side (ages two, three, and four) to all meet up for an early Christmas. 

It is getting to be quite crisp and cold, in the mornings especially. Today we had our first fire in our fireplace. It was lovely, and although there are many things about winter that I am not looking forward to, regular fires in the fireplace will be wonderful. 

There are some not so glorious things about living in an old house.  For example a pervasive sewer gas smell over the past week+ that we can't seem to get rid of, despite having had a plumber come and fix a likely culprit – I will write more about that once we find and fix the cause. But having a home with old house charms, like a beautiful fireplace to warm up to in the cold weather, is worth the trouble. 

Two!

Maren turned two years old! I don't really know where to start. Two years has flown by. We still call her our baby all the time, but she is absolutely a toddler now. Of course you can say something like "she'll always be our little baby," but really, truly, I often have a hard time thinking of her as being as old as she is.

At the same time, I sometimes forget how little she is. She is so verbal, talking in full sentences, that it can be hard to remember that there is an awful lot she doesn't understand because she is only two.
She knows whole songs, can recite whole poems/rhymes, and knows when we have misread something in a book, even if it is a library book that she has only heard us read a handful of times. She corrects us when we say something like "playing tag at school" when the book actually says "playing tag at the park" and the next page says "jumping rope at school." Her memory is sometimes scary.
Sometimes she rewrites song lyrics in her mind though, maybe because she prefers her version (Amy Grant, Baby, Baby):

She knows many dinosaurs, the names of just about everyone she has ever met, a few facts about space and planets, and countless other things that amaze me. I may be biased, but I really do think this kid is amazing :-)