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.

Alex was up a few times last night and then got up for good a little before six this morning (which Elizabeth helpfully pointed out to me later “felt like it was before five!”) She kept drinking water in a panicked way and then all of a sudden she was throwing up all over the kitchen floor.

This is a thing my kids do. We generally do not get stomach viruses. We’ve only had one that I can remember. (Ryan and I got it last year and even then, we each only threw up twice or so.) But when my kids get sick with a virus, they throw up once at the beginning of the illness, within a few hours of starting the fever, and then they run a normal fever/cough/flu/justavirus with no more throwing up.

So random fevers make my kids throw up, but only once, and besides that, they have excellent stomachs. And the kitchen floor is a wonderful place to throw up, if you are three and going to do it. It is way better than your car seat while going 75 miles per hour down the highway halfway through a three hour drive. Not that Alex did that the last time she got a fever or anything.

The kids’ taekwondo school does a monthly student of the month. Today, we were there for class (probably 90% of the school is the after school program and the remaining kids come in with a parent like my kids do) and afterwards they had the student of the month presentation.

Immediately afterwards, as we were leaving, Elizabeth marched up to the owner of the school and said “So. Do you HAVE to be an after schooler to win student of the month?”

And this man, who has two children of his own and has been running an after school program for more than a decade, looked her in the eye and said “No. Do you think I should award it to your brother next month?”