Jack Hammer

At 6AM this morning, I woke up for the first time since I went to sleep at 10PM last night. That's right, thanks to Connie, world's-greatest-babysitter, Matthew slept through the night for the first time in months. I'm not she what she did to make it happen, and it was all I could do today to keep from asking her to come over and put him to bed again tonight. Luckily, I had a lot of other things on my mind thanks to our neighbors. They have taken on a new home-improvement project which first involves digging to China. Amazingly, I think their intention is to dig an enormous hole and then fill it back in and then build a house on top of that. I hate them.

The reason I hate them is that this morning, just after Matthew had gone down for a nap, the apparatus you see above started doing its work in their back yard, about 10 feet from our house. No joke. I wasn't too worried because yesterday Matthew slept through the jackhammering, but I didn't realize that yesterday's jackhammer was a crappy little handheld jackhammer that didn't do the job and so today we had the jackhammer with some muscle. It has such big muscles that every time it started up, the entire house shook until it stopped. Of course, Matthew woke up early from his nap, refused to eat from all the commotion and I saw my dreams of another sleeping-through-the-night night going up in dust.

We even left for a few hours, only to come back to different large noise-maker doing work in their yard. At that point, I had had it. I scooped up a sleepy, frustrated, blood-shot, whiny Matthew and stormed around the corner to demand explanation of why these inconsiderate losers hadn't even bothered to inform us about the construction. (I realize that it's their right to do construction on their home, but I would have really appreciated a knock on the door, or a little note that said, "Pardon our dust! We'll be ruining any plans you might have of spending time in your home on the weekend for the next month or so!") The man was nice enough, but he said it'll be at least another weekend of work. I don't know if I'll make it.

To top it all off, as soon as our backyard neighbors stopped the excavation of their yard, our next door neighbor decided it was time for him to bust out the ol' table saw and get some work done on the shelves he's been meaning to build. So, ten feet from the other window in Matthew's room, just as I had gotten him to sleep finally by chocking him full of calories, the buzz saw convinced Matthew that the world was out to get him today. If he wasn't sure then, I confirmed it when I gave him a small piece of homemade cornbread with dinner that he didn't like. He really, really didn't like it. Before I could get to him with the sippy cup (to wash it down) he threw up all over the table. And himself. And the floor.

So, poor Matthew has had a rough day. I'm not doing much better and so it's off to bed with me in anticipation of a rough night. Wish me luck tomorrow when the whole family is back together to experience the next installment of This Old House - Hawaiian Style.