Today was Ryan’s well visit since his seventh birthday was about a week and a half ago. I always piggyback flu shots on to Ryan’s well visit because it falls at the right time of year and I can take the other two along without them getting suspicious. I know some kids do better with shots when they are prepared ahead of time but my kids are not those kids. It works best to have them find out they are getting a shot when the nurse is approaching their arm with the needle.

My best shots for kids technique is known as the Giant Candy Bar technique. It started working for Ryan at age five and hasn’t worked for Alex yet (age four). I get a giant version of their favorite candy bar and tell them they can eat it while they get their shot but only during the shot. So they have to shovel down as much as they can manage while the shot is happening. It works really well because they are so busy trying to get as much candy in as possible that they don’t have much attention to pay to their arms.

I also have a shotblocker (Amazon) and I bring iPads. It’s enough distractions that we manage to do this fairly easily. Alex still needed to be chased down, pulled out of a corner, carried to the table, seated on my lap, and held down by my legs, my arms, and a spare nurse. But we get there in the end.

Well, being mad about my broken dryer and angrily looking around for the cheapest dryer possible and refusing to buy the standard cheap dryer at all the stores WORKED.

I knew I was eventually going to have to buy a new dryer but I was mad that all the dryers in the stores were so much more than the google price online. So I just kept not buying one.

And then Matt and I were out doing errands and we drove by a store that we’d never seen before (we were waaaay away from home) and Matt said “hey, did that say Best Buy outlet?”

And it did! And I went in and it was an entire Best Buy with wall to wall washers and dryers. There was a tiny TV section and a slightly larger refrigerator and stove section but almost the entire huge Best Buy was filled with open box washers and dryers. So I found the same cheap dryer that all the stores had except that it was $150 cheaper. We slapped a sold tag on it (I beat some other people by about three minutes- the salesman asked if we really wanted it because if not, they did) and then loaded it in the back of the minivan and drove it home ourselves. We saved $150 on the dryer, $70 on the delivery fee, $30 on the vent kit (used the old one), and $28 on the plug.

Re: the plug. Dryers don’t come with plugs since 2000, who knew? Anyway, I took apart our old dryer and rewired the old plug into the new dryer. And now I have a working dryer and have been coasting on my cheap as hell dryer high since Friday.

My dryer broke. One day I was finishing a load and about to put another one into the dryer and suddenly, it wouldn’t turn on. The error code meant that the control panel was fried. I looked up how much just the part costs- $150. At this point, it’s probably cheaper to buy a new dryer than to have it repaired. Plus, the dryer is older than Elizabeth and I’ve been through several washers in that time. (I do a lot of laundry.)

So I’ve been shopping around for a new dryer. But the problem is that we are moving in somewhere between a month and a half to two years from now. That house comes with a very nice new dryer. So the replacement dryer is feasibly just for me to use for a month and a half. (The house is supposed to be done in November. We will see. Before they said July.)

Also the garage roof is leaking, I just paid $664 to remove a bunch of my dog’s teeth (she’s fifteen and a half years old, that is like a hundred and fifty in human years, this has been a very expensive year for vet bills), Matt’s car needs work, and I just got new brakes and some kind of expensive system flush on my car. So my willingness to spend money on a dryer right now is low.

Anyway, I’ve been hanging all my laundry to dry. Let me tell you how annoying this is. (Yes, I know this is common. I know other people do this. I do not usually and therefore I do not have the infrastructure in place.) I don’t have anywhere to hang it to dry. There’s nowhere outside and my HOA doesn’t allow it. I have been hanging it in the guest room closet and aiming fans at it. I have gathered all the available hangers and hooks and there aren’t quite enough to hang a whole load. Everything dries unevenly and crunchy. I have to go turn around the hangers and shift the positions of the clothes every so often. Everything is wrinkled. (And it is staying that way, I do not iron.) Everything has a bend in the middle. There’s now this extra time consuming task in the middle of the laundry. (Hang it up, turn it, turn it, take it back down, and THEN fold it.) It is a highly unsatisfying way to do laundry.

I sometimes feel like I give a false impression of Alex because I’m so used to this type of child after a decade of Elizabeth that I don’t bother to talk about it. So I share the funny bits and the sweet bits and the remarkable bits and just keep living the difficult and the extreme bits because it’s old news at this point.

Alex is certainly just as fierce and opinionated and strong willed as Elizabeth is. I can’t decide if she is more so or if she just has more territory to compete for. (At Alex’s current age, Elizabeth was still an only child.)

For example, every night I put the kids to bed in age order. The youngest goes first because she needs more sleep than the other two. Tonight she decided she wanted me to come back in her room and hold her in the rocking chair. So she screamed for me the entire time I was putting Ryan and Elizabeth to bed. By the time I came back in, she was so far gone that she started throwing up. So yes, this child is so spirited that she (reasonably often) screams herself to vomit. And it doesn’t even usually register enough for me to bother saying anything about it.

As a side note, Alex (age three and a half) is old enough to throw up into a bucket. But she’s not old enough to know that once she’s done throwing up, she shouldn’t angrily shove the bucket away from her so that it tips over and spills all over her crib anyway. Sigh.