It’s been a bit quiet around here…on this blog and in our house….It all began late last week when our stereo broke. The stereo had been acting a bit strange, going silent here and there for little moments while playing a CD. I wondered if maybe the speaker wires were loose, as has happened in the past. Then suddenly, one night, it decided to stop playing music completely. The lights go on, numbers count down, disc spins round and round, but no music comes out. We’ve tried again since then and it only plays silence.
It’s a bit of a dinosaur for a CD player: Ted bought it in 1986, and if I recall the story well, he had great fun using it to blast music out the windows of his dorm room. The stereo is older than our children, older than our marriage, older than me…well, not quite :). As I said to Ted, if each stereo we buy lasts us 17 years, we will only have a few more stereos to buy in this life. Its longevity gives us gratitude.
We’re not sure which part or component broke. It’s hard to know. Hard to know what needs to be replaced: best bet would be to buy an entire new one. But what we do know is that we’re a bit short on funds right now. Ted’s looking for work and until he finds a job, we can’t afford to replace it. It’s a good opportunity to teach the children about buying and saving and waiting. In the meantime, we can play CDs on the kitchen’s little boom box, a Costco bargain I bought in order to be sure we’d have something that could play music while I was in labor at the hospital (at our California hospital we had to bring our own boom boxes to labor and delivery, but the Seattle hospital had more entertainment electronics than our home!). And Ted’s speakers for his computer in his office sound pretty good, maybe even better than the dead stereo did, and there’s also the car stereo. So it’s not as if we are completely without music. And it’s not as if the house is completely quiet after all….
…..since we do have three small children. At the moment though all three of them are napping . A rare occasion. Also an unfortunate one: they are all sick. Guess they caught some kind of cold. Michaela got it first and the other two were ill this morning when they woke. So far it seems pretty harmless, just a simple respiratory bug with runny nose, sore throat etc. They were all complaining this morning – even Elisabeth, in her own wordless ways – so they all went to bed after lunch.
We went out to the grocery store – taking the sick kids felt so sluggish, like pushing through a tar pit – to go shopping for Michaela’s birthday celebration this weekend. I sang this little poem as we traipsed across the parking lot into the store:
Thank you God for coughs and aches
and for hippo birthday cakes
Every moment every hour
whether it tastes sweet or sour
You are there.
We’ll see how the rest of the week works out with the sick kids. But maybe if they take more naptime, then I can have a little more time to blog….
