We’ll, that’s not good.

Remember yesterday, when I was sharing how things were pretty calm and there wasn’t much to talk about? Well, that didn’t last too long.

There are two stories to share. The first is about Elijah, and the second one is just about something going on in our lives not related to Elijah’s surgery in any way. Feel free to skip over that one if you’d like. I just figured I’d share it since it’s something going on right now.

First, Elijah. Since Elijah’s surgery, we’ve been getting to bed pretty late. Julia and I haven’t been getting to bed until after midnight or later most nights. As I’ve mentioned before, we share the responsibility of giving Elijah his medicine. Sometimes it just depends on who’s home or around at that given time. I try to go to the gym three or four times during the week and many times this happens after we put the kids to bed. That’s the way last night was. I didn’t get home from the gym until around 11 p. M., Which is the same time Elijah takes a dose of his medicine, so Julia gave him that dose. He’s on two medications right now, oxycodone and diazepam AKA Valium. We alternate these every 4 hours so he’s never getting two doses of the same medicine in a row. The diazepam bottle specifically says to give it every 6 hours, but the way it works out we are only giving it to him every 8 hours. Last night after I got home from the gym, Julia and I watch some TV and then got ready for bed. When we were getting his medications ready for the night, Julia came to the realization that she had given him the diazepam at 11 p.m. The problem was, however, that he had also taken that medication at 7 p.m., meaning it had been given twice in a row and only 4 hours apart. By the time we noticed this, she had given the medication an hour and a half prior. We checked on him and he was still breathing and still responded to touch, so we knew he wasn’t dead or in a coma. He didn’t seem to be struggling with breathing or having any other issues that we could tell visibly. Still, Julia was very worried about it. She decided to call a 24-hour nurse helpline, and talked to them for a little bit. They eventually directed her to call the Poison Control helpline, which she did right after that. They didn’t think it was an emergency, but they did suggest waking him up or at least rousing him every 20 minutes for the next four to six hours. We weren’t sure that was necessary since he was already passed the point where the medications most seriously overlapped and he seemed to be doing fine, but we did want to check on him regularly. Julia decided to get up once every hour to check him and he was fine throughout the night. That was our excitement last night. And if you are thinking it, yes we do have a list to keep track of our medications. It tells us what medication to give and what time. This was just a simple mistake, and one we’re glad didn’t have any serious side effects. We are actually planning to start weaning him off of the medications slowly starting very soon. That will also help to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again, and we’ll hopefully help him return to his normal self a bit more. He’s mostly normal right now, but the medications do have some effect on him, like some increased uncoordination (is that an oxymoron?), and some increased crazy talk. It’s actually a little funny, because I’ve been remarking at how bad he is at the video games we have. I’ve just been surprised that he’s not very good and that has had such a hard time picking up some of the basics. I really think, though, that this is at least due in part to his medication. I’m guessing once he’s off of it he’ll be able to pick up these things a bit better. Anyway, he’s doing fine and he had a good day.

Grandma Rice came over to watch the kids for a bit today so Julia and I could go out and do some shopping. Then tonight we went out to the library to check out some books and videos, and that was our outing for the day. The mother of our friend Olivia, provided our dinner tonight, so we had a great feast while watching some TV. This is a common sight around our house these days.

Okay, on to the other story. Again, this one doesn’t involve Elijah, so feel free to check out here if you’d like.

Our water bill here in Phoenix, at the house we live in has been pretty steady over the last few years. It usually ranges between 50 and $70 a month, just depending on what time of the year. But it’s always pretty consistent. When I opened our bill a couple months ago I was shocked to see the total amount owed being around $260. The amount of water we used that month was at least five or six times our normal amount. I tried to figure out what was causing this and suspected our pool equipment may be the culprit. I eventually went out to check it out and found some pieces that were leaking water while our filter was running. I figured this was likely the cause since the filter runs for around 6 hours a day everyday and a stream of water leaking from it for that amount of time would obviously add up. I made a fix to bypass some of the equipment temporarily and thought that would probably fix the problem for now. I was waiting until our next bill showed up to see if it indeed did fix the problem. During my waiting our city sent someone out to check our water meter to ensure it was running properly. It was, and they checked the readings it was showing. They left us a note on our door telling us what they had found but it didn’t mean too much to me as I didn’t know what it should be. Today they followed up with a phone call to talk over the findings with me. We talked for about 30 minutes, during which we discovered that the problem was still happening. My pool fix didn’t do much as water is steadily leaking from somewhere at the rate of over a gallon a minute. The man on the phone was able to tell me that our next bill being sent out tomorrow was going to be over $350! At this point we’re using something like 10,000 gallons of water a week. Correction, we’re losing about 10,000 gallons of water a week most likely into the ground somewhere around our house. I talked with him about how to diagnose where the problem might be happening and did a few quick checks around the house to see if I could figure it out myself. I’m pretty sure I found where the problem is happening, and if I’m right, I think it’s one of the better case scenarios. The leak seems to be happening somewhere in our front yard between the water meter by the street and the front main valve going into our house. I was able to see that when I shut off the water to the house that we were still losing water, so I figure it has to be somewhere in that main line in our front yard. I guess the next step is to call out a plumber and have them double check this and pinpoint the exact spot, and then fix it. Hopefully they don’t have to dig up too much of our front yard to do so, but it’s mostly dirt and rock so there’s not too much to disturb. So that wasn’t very good news, but it could be a lot worse if the leak is in some other place much harder to get to, or causing serious damage. Anyway, like I said, right now that’s what I think is happening, but I guess it could get worse. We’ll see!