Respite?!
It had seemed so idyllic: a long weekend in NH to recover from a chaotic week in a hotel room, nothing but silence and nature walks and wind blowing through trees, no more excitement than shooing spiders out of the corners. And it was this way, until Monday morning, when we realized we had no water. The farmhouse gets water from a spring, and the hot summer rendered the spring nearly empty. We were leaving Monday evening, but there was a day to get through, so Andrew made multiple trips down to the pond to bring water up to the house in empty gallon containers. Fortunately we had enough bottled water to get us through for drinking.
We’d planned to leave just before Lucia’s bedtime, a plan that the water shortage set off-kilter since we couldn’t give her a bath. But we put her in pajamas and gave her a bottle and put her in her carseat at 7:15, and she seemed primed for sleep.
First, however, we stopped at a gas station just over the covered bridge to fill our tank before she fell asleep for good. She and I both sat quietly in the car, waiting for Andrew. I glanced out the window; Andrew was attempting to wrestle our large bag of trash (there’s no trash pickup at the farmhouse) into the gas station’s garbage can. The next time I looked, he was staring aghast at his finger, and blood was dripping so copiously onto the pavement that it looked like someone had been shot. Something in the bag had sliced his index finger.
So instead of getting on the road, I drove us to the local ER, in a tiny little hospital where the nurse knew Andrew’s grandparents and talked about his grandmother’s knitting while she took his blood pressure. Three stitches later, and an hour and a half off our scheduled departure time, we were on our way.
Lucia slept the whole way, thank goodness. But what an end to what was otherwise a peaceful, lovely finale to a hectic week of travel.
Oh, and the worst part? We deduced that Andrew cut his finger on the pull-up lid to the can of formula I'd bought. One can, two casualties.
We’d planned to leave just before Lucia’s bedtime, a plan that the water shortage set off-kilter since we couldn’t give her a bath. But we put her in pajamas and gave her a bottle and put her in her carseat at 7:15, and she seemed primed for sleep.
First, however, we stopped at a gas station just over the covered bridge to fill our tank before she fell asleep for good. She and I both sat quietly in the car, waiting for Andrew. I glanced out the window; Andrew was attempting to wrestle our large bag of trash (there’s no trash pickup at the farmhouse) into the gas station’s garbage can. The next time I looked, he was staring aghast at his finger, and blood was dripping so copiously onto the pavement that it looked like someone had been shot. Something in the bag had sliced his index finger.
So instead of getting on the road, I drove us to the local ER, in a tiny little hospital where the nurse knew Andrew’s grandparents and talked about his grandmother’s knitting while she took his blood pressure. Three stitches later, and an hour and a half off our scheduled departure time, we were on our way.
Lucia slept the whole way, thank goodness. But what an end to what was otherwise a peaceful, lovely finale to a hectic week of travel.
Oh, and the worst part? We deduced that Andrew cut his finger on the pull-up lid to the can of formula I'd bought. One can, two casualties.
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