during marty's tour on jury duty, her mother, mamma nat, has been instrumental in us surviving the week. every day when anfer gets out of pre-school she has picked him up and brought him home. upon entering our our more-disastrous than usual
1 home, she gets anfer occupied in some manner, moves to the kitchen, rolls up her sleeves and begins digging us out. i did mention this was happening daily, right?!
in gratitude, on wednesday, after everyone was safely in school, i cleaned the kitchen. i then ran by the store and bought some magazines and a variety of chocolate bars (mamma nat loves her some chocolate). i laid them out on the clean kitchen counter with a note that read, "momma nat. thank you for all of the amazing help this week. you're a lifesaver! troy". in this modest display i had three of the five love languages covered. clean kitchen (acts of service), magazines and chocolates (gifts), and my note (words of affirmation). if i were there when she arrived i may have given her a hug (physical touch) but time has taught me women, young and old, are fine that i use my words over hugs to express adoration. and as for the last love language, quality time, those minutes are quite few around these parts at the moment and not even my wife or myself are logging proper clicks of the clock with one another, so my three, and kinda four, out of five is going to have to do.
2
1 if you're wondering what 'disastrous' means on the walter-dearmitt calamity scale it is this. two weeks ago, both bella and alex got to have friday night playdates over. in addition to completely destroying the kids bedroom, one of the guests used our bathroom and didn't get the faucet turned all the way off. we had a slightly clogged drain that could not keep up with the water's flow so in time filled the sink causing the safety drain at the back of the sink to also attempt to help displace the water but it also had problems. the combined weight of the water in the sink broke loose the piece of gum marty had put on a small drip on the the drain pipe (some years back, unbeknownst to me) and in addition to water flowing over the pedestal sink's rim, was also funneling out of the backside through the failed gum-based-patch-job (which, to be fair, is exactly how i would have fixed it too). by the time a responsible party
3 walked by the bath, the entire floor was pooled with standing water. the resultant repair to the 90 year old sink, in as we all know by now, our home's only bathroom, has it presently missing all of its drain assembly and the U-pipe at the base, which i broke trying to fix the clog. so for the last ten days our camping sink has been sitting atop our bathroom radiator with a bucket on a stool beneath to accommodate our
strictly-enforced hand-washing and teeth-brushing.
2 i'm not entirely sure what mamma nat's love language is, thus my attempt to cover as many bases as possible.
3 by "responsible party" i mean someone whose first utterance upon seeing this flooding mayhem was not one of the following phrases:
- why'd you do that dad?
- hey guys, come here! you've gotta see this.
- isn't that bad for the floor?
- ohhh. cool.
