It’s been a long, stressful couple of weeks for us. And it wasn’t James causing most of the stress, either. I mean, yes, James does provide us with ample stress, almost daily, but these past couple of weeks we have been under stress from an unforeseen issue with the house. More on that in a bit, but first let me update you on James.

Another One-on-One Nurse

James lost another one-on-one school nurse a couple of weeks ago. We are on nurse #4 this school year. While it is aggravating to have to train a new nurse so frequently, we understand. The school district uses an outside agency to provide a one-on-one nurse for James. If James is not in school, that nurse does not work. I don’t know if that nurse still gets paid while James is out of school, or if she is only paid when she works. Either way, with James being out of school so much with illnesses, the agency eventually moves that nurse to another client. This is what happened with most of the nurses this year. We did have one nurse that worked with James for one day and then quit, but that was an anomaly. Let’s hope this new nurse sticks around and James can remain in school for the remainder of the school year…just two more days!

Special Olympics Young Athletes

Special Olympics Illinois has a program called Young Athletes for kids ages 2 to 7 with special needs.

James had a chance to participate and had his first experience playing sports. It was a bit warm, so he was having a rough time, but was able to roll a ball, go for a little run with mommy, jump with mommy, and play a little t-ball. He received a ribbon for his efforts.

Health Issues

If you read the post from a couple of weeks ago, you may recall that we took James to see the pediatrician at his house on a Sunday night. We took James for a check-up with the pediatrician last weekend…this time at the doctor’s office. He has a little bit of fluid buildup in both of his ears, which may explain the fact that he’s been a bit crankier lately.

James went to see the ENT this past Wednesday to have him take a look at the fluid in his ears. Looks like James will be getting new ear tubes in a couple of weeks. At the same time, they are also going to inject Botox into his salivary glands to see if that helps with secretions.

On the epilepsy side of things, we are still playing around with meds a little bit to see if we can find the right dosages, and combination of drugs that work the best. This week we started weening him off of one of those meds. Knock on wood, we really haven’t seen much as far as seizures for a while. Maybe the VNS is working, and we can eventually ween him off of all the seizure meds. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Not really health related, but we may have a new babysitter for James so that Stacy and I can go out on dates again. My mom introduced us to a friend of hers that is a retired nurse. She has met James and knows all of the care that he needs and thinks she can handle it all. Now if we can just get James over all of these illnesses so that he’s not such a pain the ass. We love him, but after eight months of this, it’s getting old.

Adventures in Home Ownership

Now onto the other stressor in our lives…our house. When Stacy and I first got married, we bought a small two bed, two bath condo. For the first couple of years after James came home from the NICU, it was fine, but we knew carrying him and all his stuff up and down the stairs wasn’t going to be something that we could do long term. We bought a nice little ranch house in 2011 that the previous owners put some money into. New windows, new doors, a relatively new roof, and wood floors in the foyer, kitchen, and dining room.

Stacy and I had always been smart about our money. When we were both working, we made sure we put some of our income into savings every month. After James was born and we lost one of those incomes when Stacy became a stay-at-home mom. We tried to remain smart with our money, but we still needed to dip into our savings here and there to cover some of the expenses that come with having a child, not to mention a child with special needs.

If you own a house, you probably know that sometimes there are unexpected expenses that you weren’t planning on: a water heater or an air conditioner breaks and needs to be repaired or replaced; or an electrical or plumbing issue that is above and beyond your skill level. Well, we just had one of those plumbing issues that was way beyond my skill level and needed to be fixed by a qualified plumber at a cost that was a little bit hard to swallow. But this is why the financial experts always recommend having an emergency fund, right? Fortunately, we had enough in savings to pay for it, but our savings account took a pretty big hit.

Several weeks ago, we started noticing these small flies throughout the house. At first, we didn’t know what they were, but soon found out that they were drain flies. They basically feed off of and breed in the sludge and gunk that builds up in drainpipes. When they first started appearing, there were just a couple here and there, but over time they seemed to multiply. Because they feed off of stuff in drains, you typically find them in bathrooms and kitchens near the sink. These are the areas that we originally saw them. But then we started seeing them in other areas of the house, like the bedrooms, and the living room.

I tried some of the remedies I found online to try to kill the drain flies in the drains. At first the number of drain flies seemed to decrease, but then they started to multiply again. It got to the point where it was starting to gross us out. Everywhere we looked we saw them. It was time to call a plumber.

The plumber came out and said that he had never seen that many drain flies before and started investigating where they were coming from. He found that they appeared to be under the kitchen sink. He determined that the drain under the kitchen sink had collapsed so everything we had been putting down the sink was basically just sitting there creating the perfect breeding ground for drain flies.

But wait, there’s more! We also have the heating and cooling ducts running under the house and the duct was close enough to the drainpipe that broke that the water that was coming out of the drainpipe under the sink was also seeping into a crack in the duct. Which probably explains why we were seeing drain flies in every room of the house. They were using the ducts as an underground tunnel system to get to various rooms of the house. In addition to having the drainpipe fixed, we also needed to have the duct repaired at the same time.

The plumber said they needed about a week to complete the work. Because of all the work that needed to be done and with James’ health issues, Stacy and James moved into my mom’s house for a week. I slept at home because I was at work during the day while they were working, and it was easier to get to work from our house than my mom’s.

Ready to see how much work it is to repair a pipe in a house on a concrete slab without a basement?

You may have noticed in the last two pictures that they also did some work in the room next door. That’s the laundry room. Once they got the drainpipe apart under where the sink goes, they scoped out the drainpipe in both directions and noticed a hold in the pipe in the laundry room under the washing machine. We had them fix that, too.

As you can probably imagine, it was a bit expensive to get this fixed. I’m just glad we had the money in savings to pay for it. Now we need to figure out how to build that back up again before our next major unplanned expense hits. We know that it’s bound to happen sooner or later.

I’m also glad to have my family back. I hadn’t seen them in almost a week, and I really missed them. It was very eerie coming home to an empty house after work. It was quiet. Too quiet. It may sound weird, but I kind of missed the random beeping of James’ pulse ox.