Housekeeping, Which is to Say:
Keeping a healthy house over happy heads
A couple of years ago I wrote about the never-ending thrill of being a homeowners. I’m going to revisit that, because this year has been a doozy. You know that metaphor about escalators — if you aren’t going up then you’re going down? That seems to be how houses are (or our house, anyway). If you aren’t fixing something, then it’s falling down around your ears.
I naively thought the house was in pretty good shape when we started the year, so I decided to tackle a discretionary project: the kitchen floor. I suppose “discretionary” is in the eyes of the beholder. The linoleum floor was probably 30 years old and needed to be taped down at the seam in front of the kitchen sink where it was curled and chipped, revealing the subfloor. Elsewhere it was dinged and damaged. In the dry air of winter, the edges all around the kitchen started curling up. The overall impression of “shabby” was obvious even to me. I’ve seen nicer kitchen floors while peering through the boarded up windows of an abandoned property.
So we got a new kitchen floor.
Nothing fancy; just an updated vinyl. The short reason is that the floor is not flat, therefore our options were to do a lot of dubiously beneficial things to level it or just use flexible flooring. Also, I like sheet vinyl. It’s infinitely practical. I am infinitely practical too.
Of course, having a nice new floor got me thinking about painting the cabinets and replacing the countertops, so I started a Pinterest board. I even got a few quotes. But then reality hit.
Because next up we had to replace the first floor gutters and downspouts, patch a persistent leak in the roof (for the second time), and fix a collapsing retaining wall. Then it turned out we should have replaced a second-floor gutter as well. So we did.
There’s a peculiar rule of thumb that you will need 1% of the value of your house for maintenance each year. (By this math, you need about the same amount to maintain a shoebox in Manhattan as a mcmansion in rural Alabama, so don’t think about it too hard.) By April of 2024 we were at 3% easily, maybe more, depending how you value the house (I personally do not agree with Zillow). Then the air conditioner gave up the ghost. The quotes I got to replace the air conditioner ranged from $10k to $58k. Isn’t that interesting?
It’s important to always get three quotes and make sure you understand what is being quoted. That way, you can tell the salesguy that his ultra-efficient, oversized, bells-and-whistles $58k system will need 120 years to pay for itself over the basic, inefficient, properly sized $10k system. There are very few highlights to buying a new air conditioner, but that is definitely one of them. (To be fair, there is a federal rebate that brought the payback period down to “within my lifetime” but still not within the lifetime of the air conditioner.)
I once dated an electrician who said that since he put a full wrap on his van he could charge twice his competitors. He said people pay happily because they confuse gloss with competence. I have kept this in mind when hiring contractors and would like to point out that Mr. $58k AC had a glossy full wrap van with a sleek logo.
Anyway, that put my Pinterest kitchen on hold. Which is really fine, because planning and anticipation is always better than execution. Execution is imperfect, and then your kids come along and hammer a fork into the newly painted cabinets or stain the quartz with grape juice. (If you think I’m making this up, I’ll show you the fork dents in the new-to-us dining room table, installed there by children the night after I dragged it home from a warehouse somewhere out past Norristown. This is why we don’t get nice things.)
I settled for upgrading the lighting, which they cannot reach. Our kitchen is now so blinding that your pupils become pinpricks as you prepare your morning coffee. But on the bright side, we no longer need under-cabinet lighting.
Okay That’s Enough House, How Are the Kids?
Running in parallel to this, we discovered that Tal and Zev react poorly to dairy and Ayal reacts even more poorly to gluten, thus officially making us one of Those Families You Never Want to Have Over. (One night we went to a shul pizza party and brought our own gluten-free and dairy-free pizza.) Seriously, though, I thought allergies food sensitivities and all that nonsense only happened to other, less sensible people. I need to have a talk with my guardian angel.
Let’s pause because I have a thought. You often hear from Europeans and NPR reporters that it’s craaaazy that pharma companies can market directly to consumers in the USA. Apparently they think people shouldn’t be asking their doctors about treatments; that info should only go one way.
Are doctors in the rest of the world so vastly superior? Because I’ve learned that doctors really don’t know everything. We went through two pediatricians, two GIs, and two allergists before finding a doctor familiar with gluten sensitivity having neurological effects. Our case did not surprise him; his craziest case was a girl whose only symptom of celiac was falling over a lot. Why is asking your doctor about Neurovexal different than asking them for a blood test? (S)he can always say “no”.
Let’s Keep It Idyllic Here
K, let’s talk positive stuff. The garden went really well this year. I planted mini bell peppers and grape tomatoes and we had a bumper crop of both. Unfortunately, the kids don’t touch tomatoes. They do like bell peppers, just not mine.
“From the store is better,” they explained.
Just what every gardener loves to hear.
We also had more string beans (in three colors!) than anyone really wanted to eat. I gave away a lot of produce this summer. The recipients seemed happy.
Truly, the cure for hubris is children.
The Burning Question
You might wonder: did any children learn to swim this summer?
No.
Next topic.
Tal started daycare, which thrilled him at first, until he realized he had to go every day. Then, to make matters worse, he discovered that his brothers were both going to a different school without him! For a while his days were a roller coaster between proudly sharing his drawings and “homework” and miserably pondering if he will ever go to Kohelet Yeshiva.
Zev started kindergarten at Kohelet and things were exciting at first. In the first week we got a call from the principal saying she had to have a chat with him about throwing rocks at glass windows. This is a terrible characterization of what occurred.
Zev, tired and overwhelmed at the end of a long day, had hidden under some mats in the gym. This precipitated a child-hunt by the staff.
When they found him, he tried to explain that he was dealing with his big feelings. To demonstrate how big his feelings were, he lifted the largest landscaping rock he could find. To demonstrate dealing with his big feelings, he hurled it as far as he could, coincidentally in the direction of the plate glass windows. No windows were harmed, but I almost busted a rib laughing.
The second call was a week later and just as funny: Zev managed to activate the suicide protocol. Again, it was the end of the day and he just wanted to be somewhere quiet and I guess “dead” seemed very peaceful. I started packing him some extra snacks and his teachers found him quiet places to sit and that, alas, was the end of amusing calls from school.
Since then, we’ve only heard gushing from his teachers about how he is so in tune with his feelings. This is because Zev says things that adults love to hear.
Every morning the teacher goes around the room asking the kids “How are you feeling?” and most kids say “good". Zev, however, will say that he feels “like a jar of rainbow sprinkles that has just been shaken.” (Actual quote.) What teacher wouldn’t melt?
It’s too bad we don’t live 500 years ago. He could already be employed as a court poet. Instead, he’s thrilling his teachers in morning meeting.
Don’t You Have Another Kid?
I haven’t said much about Ayal here because he hasn’t been very dramatic. No rocks tossed at windows and no meltdowns in front of school buildings. I haven’t even had to patch his roof (although he’s due for a haircut)! All this is good. I’m not complaining at all. I will complain that he went and sprained his foot two weeks into soccer and never played again.
On the positive side, after half a year of playing Keys and Kingdom and tickling the ivories for fun in his spare time, we decided he has earned some real piano lessons. His piano teacher asked if there was a piece he would like to work on, and Ayal said “The 1812 Overture.” Why? Because it has cannons. Never mind that Ayal is not playing the cannon part. It’s still obviously the coolest piece.
How do my kids know this fun fact, you may ask.
Ayal’s school teachers say he “advocates for himself” when he’s bored in class, which made me laugh, mostly at them. As a parent I sometimes wish he would “advocate” for himself a little less, but they seem to think it’s good.
K Lonna But What About You?
I thought you’d never ask! Exciting things happened this year! I averaged going to the gym about 1.15x a week, and according to GoodReads, I read 48 books. Granted, some of those are actually just scathing reviews of Pete the Cat books (worst series ever), so reality is probably closer to 38 real books. But really, what more can I ask?
Okay, I can think of a few things. Like maybe two visits to the gym each week.
I’m working my way up to a 5k, which I’d like to run in the spring. Hold me to it!