I was hoping for a nice night of sleep to hopefully start catching up. Aaron is a great sleeper. He sleeps hours and hours during both the day and night, but it's not in any kind of routine, so I don't know what kind of sleep I'll get any night and it makes nursing quite interesting. Case in point, he woke up at 3:30 this morning for the second or third time, but then I had to wake him up at 8AM because I was dying to feed him. It's all good and normal and I'm not concerned about it at all since he seems to love to sleep, but I will be pleased when we get more of a schedule going. That's weeks away I'm sure.
Anyway, back to my hopes for the night. I was hoping for a good night's sleep in relation to having a newborn baby. Somewhere around 2 or 3AM I woke up to find Genevieve had crawled into bed with us. Usually when she finds her way into our room it involves crying and waking us up, so I was a bit surprised. She always climbs in, lays down perpendicular to us and proceeds to kick Bill repeatedly as she sleeps. What a dear! Maybe it's her way of cuddling? lol. Anyway, I woke Bill up to take her back and he was totally surprised too, which was funny since he was getting kicked.
So we went back to sleep and were up again at 3:30AM with Aaron, who was hungry. He was kind of fussy and I was trying to calm him down so he could sleep when suddenly we heard what sounded somewhere between a big paper bag being popped and a crack of thunder, followed by a huge rush of water. Both Bill and I bolted upright, wondering what the heck had happened. Thank goodness we were awake because Bill hopped out of bed and went running to see what had happened. He called back to me that it was the water heater, which caused me to jump up and go running to help because the closet with our water heater also has two toolboxes in it, our vacuum, and some miscellaneous household stuff. We immediately pulled it all out as Bill frantically turned off water intake and tried to figure out what else to turn to get the water to stop rushing out. The closet quickly filled with several inches of water and more just kept pouring out of a panel on the side of the heater as well as the bottom seam.
We hurried to work on the immediate problem of water pouring everywhere and tried to mop it up with five or six towels. It had seeped out into the hall down towards the kitchen and back towards our bedroom, plus we discovered a bit later that it had seeped under the kitchen cabinets and also into our bathroom, both of which border the closet. Bill had the good idea to use a cutting board as a squeegee of sorts to push the water back towards the closet and soak it up with the towels. I did that and he wrung out the towels. In the meantime I tried to figure out who to call for an emergency maintenance request. Turns out my phone doesn't register pressing the buttons on the phone tree for our apartment office so I had to switch to Bill's phone. This wasn't frustrating at all being that I was trying to keep water from seeping into the hall closet and further down the halls and everywhere else. Oh wait, yeah, it was really frustrating. But I finally got through, left a message, and waited for a call back, then went back to pushing water back into the closet.
Thankfully we have an absolutely fantastic maintenance guy who called back within minutes and was over to assess the damage a few minutes later. I seriously love that guy. He's the nicest and his name is Scooter, so that's awesome too. :) Here's the cool part. He was actually already awake when we called. The phone tree problems made it take a few tries for us to connect, but he had woken up not too much before, couldn't fall asleep, and felt like he should get up. Talk about blessings for us! That's why he could get to us so fast. He was able to connect up a hose to the water heater to drain all the water out, plus call the guy that deals with carpets, who came around 7:30AM to soak up the water and put a fan on it.
Needless to say, it was an eventful morning. Our efforts at the time seemed pretty fruitless trying to soak up all the water, but after the fact I'm pretty sure it saved the complex thousands of dollars of damage and us a huge headache to deal with the cleanup. I'm just so glad it happened when Bill and I were both home as opposed to me alone or us all gone. That could have been disastrous. I'm still worried about the water that seeped under the walls. We have the fan pointed as best we can in that direction to hopefully dry some of it out. The carpet is already dry, so that's good. Black mold grows here so fast, so I'll be watching for it. That's my biggest worry.
So as my title says, I'm so stinkin' glad we're renting right now and had plenty of hands on deck to help us out. I wouldn't have wanted to deal with this alone and find a company to clean up and all that stuff. Here's to the perks of renting. :)
Oh, and as we finally made it out of the house to church a mere five minutes before it started though it is a 15-minute drive away, after having taken cold showers, I turned to Bill and said, "We've been up since 3:30AM and we still can't make it to church in time?!" Yeah, still working on that three kids timing thing. 10AM church snuck up on us. lol.
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