If yesterday's post was a heart-warming look at a father-son seasonal bonding moment, today's is the "through the looking glass" version of what happens when a month's worth of ice and snow all melts in two days.

While Ed was napping yesterday and just as I was about to take advantage of the quiet time for the same, John came from the bedroom to the living room to announce, "We've got a big problem." I followed him back to the bedroom where he showed me a steady stream of water dripping from the window frame. We'd seen outside earlier that there was melting from the roof line, but didn't consider it further until it was encroaching on our bedroom. John went out and borrowed our neighbor's ladder (which he helpfully stores along side his house) and after some awkward maneuvering that resulted in a torn screen, but thankfully not a broken window, secured it against the side of the house so that he could climb up to witness firsthand the solid blocks of ice that our gutters had become.

Suffice it to say that our afternoon of peaceful slumber never materialized. John tried chipping the ice himself, but was getting nowhere. There are stories in the paper every winter about ice dams and they always say the same thing: don't try to clear them yourself or you'll end up making things worse. I got through to a local roofing company who said they'd send someone. Two hours later, two 20-something guys showed up with ladders and ice chippers and set to the amazingly loud work of cutting through the ice and removing it from the gutters. They also pushed all the remaining snow from the roof to eliminate further melting/draining issues. Listening from the inside, I could only envision our yard full of our former gutters, but apparently they knew what they were doing because in about an hour they cleared the ice from the east and west gutters, took our $65 check and left. The inside dripping subsided and as we gathered up the wet towels for the laundry we felt pretty lucky to have escaped that easily.

Not so fast. This morning while snuggling with Edward as he emerged from the last bits of sleep, I could hear a steady "drip drip drip" in the living room. I crossed my fingers and hoped it was melting hitting the downspout just outside the window. But then John got up, investigated, found a soggy curtain, and we were back at square one--this time through the living room window. So that's how John ended up on a ladder at 7:30 this morning. The front gutter was not completely iced over as the sides had been, but he chipped it away anyway and I secured more towels in place to catch the dripping. Later, as the towels became overwhelmed, John hung a bucket from the curtain rod. It's still hanging there 12 hours later, though the dripping has slowed substantially.

Who knows what the full fall-out from this weekend will be. We surely will have to have someone check for rot in the two windows and in the soffits, but the last thing we need is major reconstruction when our goal for the spring/early summer is to sell this house and find one with more space! Guess we'll just cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, I guess you could say our last weekend as a one-child household was far from restful. Now we have three days to gear up for the big event on Thursday. And lots of laundry to run between now and then.

Two funny Ed stories to lighten the mood. We went out to dinner last night with John's parents. We'd been planning to spend some afternoon time with them, but that didn't happen since we were occupied with the ice. When the salads came, Ed rejected my attempt to share some lettuce but moments later reached over to grab a ring of red onion. He inspected it a bit then put it in his mouth. I expected a sour face and a tongue full of onion to emerge from the mouth, but no, he ate that bite, finished the ring and then reached for more. He ate from both my plate and John's. Raw onion at age two. The other incident was this evening as I was lazing on the couch while John and Ed played chase and other assorted games. Ed ran into the kitchen at one point and started pointing up. John said, "Oh, he's looking at the smoke alarm" which has a flashing red light that he likes to check on from time to time. Ed said, "De-tec-tor!" No smoke alarms for this kid--only smoke detectors.