His Last Days, as an only child

As is my wont, I'm posting pix 3 months old. Besides lazy, my other excuses include: paranoid that my medically fragile child meets a most unfortunate turn in the road, ditto newborn, ditto older home. Two out of three since these photos were taken have occurred (see the janky line issues, and the not-mentioned hole in the ceiling incident).

These are from the weekend preceding Bo's big #3 birthday, the one the docs in Ann Arbor insisted we would never see, at least not without transplant and huge medical complications. They were wrong again. Each passing day is a testament to their utter wrongness, on so many levels. I'm not mad, I'm not hatin', I'm just sayin'.

Don't get me wrong, I love our house; it is built with old water-tight wood, plaster, brick and apparently the thickest cast iron tub our plumber has ever seen, but why our plumber knows about the thickness of said tub is part of the story. There was a patch in the ceiling of the living room, under the tub. During my maternity leave I noticed the paint bubbling at that site. My MIL matter of factly stated that it was a moisture issue, so required plumbing before plastering. In fact, the previous owner had smashed/discovered a hole in the ceiling, and instead of fixing a slow drip, shoved half a dozen towels up into the ceiling and patched it up. Still leaking. The tub was leaking down the back into the ceiling, and out the front with a noisy dripdripdrip. When we replaced those fixtures due to the drip, I guess the new fixtures leaked even more (thus reinforcing my notion that older homes are better, as it took nearly 80 years for those original fixtures to give up, and less than 3 for my new ones to do so; I digress). So, bubbling paint. So the plumber smashed a hole, fixed the new fixture, replaced the old tub drain, and removed the moldy towels. The handyman ("Joe the Builder, to you, if you are a toddler) patched up the hole better than when we bought the house. And Jose will paint it this week. If I ever run into that fool who owned the house before us, I think I will give him a hard punch in the nose, or at least a string of obscenities. But, even with that ordeal, I'm glad we found the mysterious source of the occasional musty odor we'd detect in the house after a long weekend away. And as a microbiologist, I am every which way but grossed out, and totally relieved to be rid of those grungy mold/mildew towels.