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If you know Matt very well he isn’t well known for being handy around the house. When he talks about tools in general he means tools that you install on your computer to improve efficiency or that do something cool.

Well, yesterday he accomplished something fairly advanced on the fix-it scale. Our refrigerator’s in-door water dispenser has been broken for months. The ice machine works at least, but not the water. I’ve done a lot of research to figure out what the problem was and thanks to a recall even had a GE repair guy show me exactly what was wrong. We had to replace the water valve in the back of the fridge, unfortunately the repair guy didn’t have the right parts in his van or he would have done it for us.

I found the part and had it delivered and handed it to Matt and told him to replace the old one without instructions, only with my vague memory of what the repair guy had shown me. He was a bit apprehensive at first, the part didn’t look very plug and play like most of what he connects to his laptop. We had to turn the water off, unplug lots of tubes that we were concerned contained a lot of water and he had to pull out his winter gloves to undo some copper tubing (we don’t have workman’s gloves…).

After what was probably an hour of work we finally had a working water dispenser!

I think I will have him look into the leaks in the sink and shower, perhaps he could have had another career as a repair guy.

I really can’t stop laughing… Check out the comments in this post. Turns out mom’s a genius: in the drawer under Colin’s crib—there is our missing bouncy chair!

Thanks mom.

How about a fun little game of compare the belly? One of these photos was taken when I was 39 weeks pregnant with Colin, the other was taken this week at about 36 weeks pregnant with Hannah. Can you tell which is which?

We have gone into storage to find all of the baby stuff we need for Hannah’s pending arrival and the one thing we are missing is Colin’s old bouncy seat. I swear we didn’t loan it out, but we can’t find it anywhere. Has anyone else seen it?

Colin lived in his, so if Hannah is anything like her brother we will definitely need to either find this or get a new one I guess!

We had originally intended to go to the Train Show at the New York Botanical Gardens, but it turns out Thomas the Tank Engine can cause quite a stir in these here parts and we were treated to a SOLD OUT sign upon arrival. Bummer!

We were visiting the show with the Barr family and they did some quick thinking and came up with CMOM: The Children’s Museum of Manhattan as a quick alternative. It was cool! Colin had a great time even after getting driven all over creation (from Hoboken over the George Washington Bridge through Manhattan to the Bronx and then back to Manhattan’s Upper West Side)…

CMOM has what looks to be a bunch of great stuff for Colin, but we didn’t have that long so we ended up playing on just one of the 5 or so floors. Colin was able to first pretend to be a fireman (!) both by getting inside a firetruck, but also by dressing the part. He had a great deal of fun crawling back and forth through a long tunnel that they had underneath one of the elaborate pieces of play equipment (even threatening to trample much smaller children in his haste—you can see something in that poor little girls’ expression).

The “dragon” (or “dinosaur” depending on what Colin decides to call it each time we talk about it) Colin is climbing off of in this picture was the center of much of time in the museum. It was crowded by scads of little ones each picking up blocks off the floor to “feed” the dragon. When it wasn’t so noisy you couldn’t hear anything, the dragon actually told you what letter was on the block and what food started with that letter, but I think that was a subtlety lost on most of the kids (and parents since most of them seemed to drop their kid(s) in the epicenter and gravitate to the benches around the outside).

Anyway, this whole thing answered a question I had about how Colin would fend for himself if he wasn’t just hanging out with Ceci whom he has known 90% of his life. Another child who was much older, though not much bigger, than Colin decided Colin had the cooler block and grabbed onto it. Colin stayed very calm and simply stared the boy down for a minute and then in a dramatic gesture yanked it back into his sole possession. Is it weird I was awfully proud of him?

The other thing to note? That cool red fleece Colin wore? Compliments of his Aunt Rosie! (See how nice I was to note call you his GREAT Aunt Rosie?) (Oh, wait…) Anyway, thanks Rose Anne!

Cecilia and Colin only have a week and a half left together sharing their nanny and I think it has resulted in some inappropriate behaviors.