>The Heat is… Off

Oh, the joys of living in a seventeen-year-old house.

Seventeen seems to be the magic number at which everything starts crapping out. The roof has a small leak. The refrigerator is on its last legs. The water heater and microwave oven have had to be replaced. The carpets and floors are looking pretty sad. And worst of all, the upstairs and downstairs HVAC units are sputtering and wheezing their way into oblivion. New units cost about $3500 apiece and everyone on our street either has just replaced theirs, or like us, is about to.

Suffice it to say it was no great surprise when the heater stopped working last night. Again.

What this meant for my husband and I was that we would have to get out the Pack n’ Play and an extra featherbed mattress and transfer a sleeping 3-year-old and 11-month-old to our room for the night. Punky was no problem; her brother has had some uh, “issues” with learning to sleep through the night and she’s grown very accustomed to being pulled out of her bed at three in the morning and plunked down on a featherbed pallet at the foot of our bed (we call it her nest, and she likes it very much, thank you).

Bruiser, on the other hand, didn’t take it so well, which was no surprise. He immediately woke up and started crying when I picked him up from his crib. It didn’t help matters when he was placed in the Pack n’ Play, which has got to be the most uncomfortable excuse for a bed ever. He sat up, looked around, and began screaming at the top of his lungs.

It was a long, long night.

We managed to get him back to sleep with a bottle, at least until 4 am, when he decided he was up for good. Thank God this was my one-morning-a-week-to-sleep-in, because Hubs was the one who got up, took him downstairs to his 60-degree room, put him in his own crib, and gave him a bottle. Within two minutes, he was back asleep again, covered in blankets. The boy must like it cold, because he slept late into the morning.

Of course, this being Saturday, we won’t be able to get the dang heater fixed until Monday, so I’m predicting a long, cold weekend. There’s a fire roaring in the den, the extra space heater is whirring in the kids’ room where Bruiser is napping, and everyone’s dressed to kill in their winter warmest.

We just paid off our house insurance for the year and bought new tires for the SUV this week. We’re buying a new dishwasher on Monday. We’re buying two new light fixtures for our den and kitchen the week after that. We need a new computer ASAP. And now, whee! We’re getting a new HVAC.

I have a friend who lives in an apartment and yearns for a house. Meanwhile, I’m nostalgic for the days when my husband had a large apartment and if something broke, someone came and fixed or replaced it, free of charge. Life’s funny that way, isn’t it?

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.