What I said: "Beautiful day. Hope this weather lasts."
What I wanted to say: "You freaking idiot, you could have killed me and my family. What the heck were you THINKING!!!"
It took a lot of willpower not to shoot daggers (and I'm not just talking with my eyes...I have a collection of throwing stars and throwing knives that are just itching to be made use of) at our landlady's son last weekend when running into him after THE INCIDENT. I shall explain.
A few months ago we moved into a carriage home. That is a fancy term for a apartment-type unit built off of someone's garage. At least, that is what ours is. I have many likes and dislikes about the place.
Likes: not worrying about being too noisy for the neighbours like we had to in the apartment; our own backyard with a view of horses frolicking in the fields.
Dislikes: the spiders, the mold, the possessed heating, the lack of ample lighting, the lack of closet space, have I mentioned the spiders?
Right now it works for us and I deal with the little quirks. Last week I didn't want to deal. I wanted to cry, and so I did, and then I wanted to start looking for another place to live. What happened? The house owner's son decided to kill the weeds surrounding their house and the garage (which is us). Since Round-Up didn't work, he did what his dad used to do--sprayed everything with gasoline. What was even worse was that I had been smelling the gas for a while, and thinking it was coming from the garage I opened the windows to air the place out, but it only let more in. Within a few minutes, our place was filled with fumes and we were forced to call up my family to ask if we could stay with them for the night.
Now, this obviously wasn't some malicious attempt to gas us, but being a new mom, my instincts swung into full force and I really just wanted to hit the guy. It was late at night and he didn't even think to warn us. Had we already been in bed, we may have slept through as the fumes filled our place up. It may not have harmed my husband and I, but in no way was it safe for our baby.
It is instances like this where words must be chosen carefully. I know it was not his intention to harm or inconvenience us and so I chose to be forgiving and cordial when inside I still simmered and wanted to say some sarcastic comment.
The nice thing about the written word is that you have time to choose your words and edit them so that they sound the best they could be. What is unfortunate about the spoken word is that there is less of a filter. This is an area where I am extremely weak, and it was put to the test last week.
Even though she had to sleep in her bouncy chair, our baby slept well that night. I didn't, of course. I think I woke every hour to check on her. Ah, being a new parent. So much fun and so much worry :(
2 comments:
Yep scary, and totally incompetent on their part.
I understand about the new mum bit too. I kept getting up to check my girl was breathing, I think it's something we all do.
Oh man, I totally still do that. Well, I've eased up a bit. For the longest time I would be up every two or three hours to check on her and place my hand on her little tummy. I'm glad to know that that is a normal thing to do!
We had an Angelcare monitor that we borrowed from friends, but she kept moving in her sleep, and since the pad was small, it would be as soon as she was off of it. Nice idea but it didn't work for us :)
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