this just in: dirty baby takes bath!

Last Friday we had the pleasure of finding a flooded utility room. Ick. We had been planning to replace the aging water heater for a while, and just hadn't gotten around to making the call to have it done yet. The water heater forced our hand. Anyway, we got a tankless "on demand" water heater, which we did for two reasons, the freed up space in the utility room and the energy efficiency. When your house is 900 square feet reclaiming roughly 42 square feet is a pretty big coup, so we were willing to shell out the extra dough it cost to go tankless. 5 x 5 storage places in seattle cost at least $40 a month, so...The bad thing about the water heater going on Friday was that we couldn't have it install next-day. It ended up being a multi-day affair to install the thing (pipes were moved, etc.) so we were without hot water until Wednesday night. Thankfully we have the electric kettle to boil water, because that's how I had to do all of our bottles and dishes. Because of some funky plumbing in the utility room, we were also without a clothes washer, so we were really roughing it. The new water heater is great, and we have a digital thermostat, so we'll never get scalded. Why do the Brits use these hot water heaters almost exclusively and we use those stupid dinosaurs that take up so much space and waste so much electricity?

Needless to say, we were all ready for bathing after the water heater was installed, G included. In honor of the new water heater we got G a REAL tub. Until now we'd been using a foam thing for sponge baths, and doing it on the kitchen counter. We decided he was ready for a big-kid bath. The one we got him is cool and folds up for storage (again, ideal for our tiny house, I will probably store it in my 42 sq feet of space in the utility room). At first when I put him in he was a little bit freaked out, but in about ten seconds he quieted down and seemed to enjoy himself. He definitely liked it better than the plain old sponge bath. After the bath I rubbed him in olive oil (that's what our doc recommended we use for moisturizing, because it's so safe) and he was just so tickled with himself. It reminded Amos of how Miles Davis is after a bath--really excited and happy.

Oh, and congrats to Amos' former colleague and our friend, Amy, & her hubby Kris who welcomed their new daughter Eloise at 1 pm today.