Shakes fist at sky

Today was a glorious day. Mid-sixties, sunny, wonderful. I joyously flung open all the windows, saying "It'll be nice to air out the stuffy winterness...and we'll save on heat!" I enjoyed the lovely day.

Then, as I was reading Oh The Places You'll Go to Emily before bed, I heard what sounded like rain outside. "Funny" I thought, "I remember the weather people mentioning wind, but not rain. It must just be that the wind kicked up because no way is it raining hard enough to make a roar like that."

But alas, it was. And the rain was pouring right in through all my open windows.

So I hurriedly put Emily in the crib, blew some quick kisses and ran out of the room. And when I looked out the front window, rain was POURING down in sheets.

What the hell? When it rains in January here, it's just a wimpy depressing drizzle. I have NEVER seen a summer-quality downpour like this in the winter. Sure, it was unseasonably warm today, but it's not unheard of to have nice days here and there sprinkled throughout the winter to keep our skin from falling completely off from the cold and dryness. They've never come complete with authentic summer monsoon before though.

My house has a lot of windows, and stupid panicked me, the first ones I closed were the ones that open onto the front porch. The ones with the least chance of the rain reaching in. Oh well.

The damage is minimal. But I'm still so confused. My windowsills and wood floor and Emily's toddler-sized chair and table set were pretty soaked, but all of those are hard surfaces I easily dried off. The problem was in the dining room, where it rained all over the carpet and an upholstered chair. I'm not sure what to do about that. I feel like pressing a towel onto it will absorb some moisture, but will probably also mash water deeper into the under-layers. I guess the best thing to do would be to get a fan set up and open the windows and let the moisture evaporate that way, but now it's all humid outside and it's supposed to get cold again.

And of course, it only rained for like, 5 minutes and then stopped. It just had to teach me a lesson for trying to enjoy the rare gift of a warm day in February.

Also I just had to go running upstairs to pull my daughter's leg back out from between the crib slats. Last night she awoke at 11 screaming and confused and when I rushed in to see what was the matter I found that she had thrust her foot out of the crib in her sleep, then rolled over, wedging and painfully twisting her foot. Luckily tonight she made a noise when she poked her leg out in her sleep so I checked the video monitor and was able to avert another leg-twisting incident. Thank goodness that girl inherited her mother's ability to never ever bruise, In the last 4 days alone she's taken a face dive from the breakfast area down into our sunken family room (on the wood floor), smashed her face while she was crawling around under the dining room table and fell on the leg of a chair, bonked her head spectacularly when she slipped on a blanket on the family room floor and then pinched and twisted her foot last night in her sleep. If she bruised easily the gym daycare would be reporting me to child services. And I wanted to take her crib bumper off yesterday. Without it she'd probably be wedging her entire torso through the side of the crib in her sleep.

At least it seems I made the right decision there. About the windows though? Not so much.