What a day!

We had a wonderful morning this morning.  Xander slept in, and so did we.  It was lovely.  I had plans to make Erin breakfast this morning, but instead Erin made me breakfast (waffles with blueberries and raspberries!!) while I straightened up around the house.  After a casual morning, we put Xander in the Chariot and hopped on the bikes and headed for Boulder.  We had a relaxing spin into town and stopped at the Dushanbe Teahouse for a wonderful cup of tea and lunch.  I had this amazing dish that I can only describe as chickpea hush puppies in a Persian tomato broth with pomegranate syrup.  Really, it was awesome.  Xander had pancakes and a cup of whole milk.  We tried having him drink from the cup, but we were making such a mess that we tried a straw.  He got sooo close to drinking out of the straw, but never quite got the milk all the way to his mouth.  Instead Erin ended up putting her finger over the end of the straw to transfer milk into his mouth, he thought that was awesome.  Xander charmed all the staff, as usual.  I'm both thrilled and afraid of how charismatic this child is.  If he has everyone wrapped around his finger like this when he is 16 we are all going to be in trouble.  Unfortunately no photos of this trip, but here's a picture of the tea house.  It really is spectacular.

We headed home and Xander took a nap.  I went to move some laundry and found the washer not draining well after washing the dogs blankets.  So, I got out a pipe cleaner to try to clean out the drain tube.  It just wouldn't come clean so, I figured I'd pull the tube out to clean it.  It was only a few screws...

Well, in a project like this one thing leads to another, and after searching for the service manual online, I asked Erin to help and we ended up with the washing machine almost entirely disassembled.  A piece of advice: never, ever, look inside your washing machine, you really don't want to know what's in there.

Yuck!  Once you look, you just can't help yourself.  So, about 2 hours of scrubbing and lots of 409, Tilex and hot soapy water later, we had everything clean.  It was a lot of work to scrub out the entire inside of the washer.

It turns out, while they work great most of the time, an awful lot of people have trouble with a mildew smell in their Maytag Neptnue washers.  We have too, and just made it a point to never leave wet laundry in there, it goes immediately into the dryer.  I think now I know why.  There is all sorts of advice on tricks to get rid of the smell, but from what I saw, nothing but disassembly and a lot of elbow grease is ever going to clean it out.  Anyway, thankfully Xander took a marathon nap after the bike ride, and we finished up just as he was waking up.  

In a whirlwind of pots and pans Erin produced a fantastic quick dinner.  By then it was 8:30 and we were exhausted.  We got Xander into a bath and he decided to try drinking out of a cup again.  He has this set of nesting bath toy cups from Jess McMakin that he likes to play with.  He started filling the cups up and trying to pour them into his mouth.  Boy was he surprised the first time it actually worked.  He coughed and sputtered, then gave me a huge grin and tried again.  I considered that bath water probably wasn't the best thing to drink, but he was just having too much fun!  By the end of the bath he was getting pretty good at filling the cup, bringing it up to his mouth, getting the correct side of the cup in his mouth, and pouring water in.  He was so proud of himself, I was pretty proud too!

It was an eventful day. I'm not sure where all the time went, but it sure went by fast, we still haven't changed out of our bike shorts!

Xander is now asleep and we are headed to bed too, after a shower.  What a day.

-Jake