Girl

The good news is, it's a healthy baby girl. Her name is Ava and she seems to be doing fine. We talked to her aunt today and apparently she has been sleeping quite a bit. Hariette is doing well also and is so happy! That's about where the good news stops. There is another reason we were talking with the neighbors upstairs...

Erin was in the living room finishing her lunch when she heard what seemed to be water pouring down from somewhere. The noise got quieter and she assumed it was just water flowing through the pipes from a flushing toilet or a shower upstairs. Five minutes later, Erin was on her way to the kitchen with her lunch plate when she was shocked to see spots of water all over the hallway. She quickly realized that water was indeed flowing--pouring almost like a waterfall from the light fixture in our bathroom onto the floor. There was water all over the bathroom floor, spots of water soaking the ceiling, and water running down the walls into the hallway.

Needless to say, the electricity wasn't exactly functioning in the bathroom at this point. On further examination, Erin found the electricity was off in the entire apartment. Erin ran upstairs to Hariette's apartment to see what the problem might be. Hariette's mother answered the door. Erin asked if something was wrong with water somewhere and Hariette's mother, who spoke very little English, said, while smiling, "Yes, something's wrong. Come see." Erin saw well enough that the birthing pool Hariette had used in the living room yesterday now had a siphon hose coming out of it all the way into the bathroom tub. The bathroom (sunken lower than the rest of the apartment, thank goodness!) was covered in about 2 inches of water. Our neighbor's mother knelt down and began collecting water in a tupperware and dumping it into a bucket. Looking up she said,"I'm trying. Do you know what to do?" No, Erin did not know what to do! How did this happen?! Maybe the hose slipped out of place or something, because substantially all of that water came through the floor and into our bathroom. Yeah, we were thinking the same thing you're probably thinking right now.

So, not knowing quite what to do or who to call, she decided to ride over to use the phone at Annette Cooper's, the wife of a fellow expat at the office. (In her panic, Erin forgot that we bought a cord phone last weekend for times such as this when the electricity goes out.) On the way out the door, she ran into the aunt mentioned above, and explained the situation to her. She was horrified. She went upstairs and returned to our apartment 5 minutes later. She said the mess was all cleaned up in their bathroom. The water was dripping much slower, and she helped Erin dry off the drips on the ceiling while Erin used towels to mop up the rest of the mess. Hariette's sister was quite concerned that we not bother Hariette about this, so Erin assured her that she would call the relocation company to see if they could just tell her who to call to fix this chaos.

Anyway, being experienced in power outages, Erin knew just what to do. She packed up all the food she had just bought at the store, loaded it up in her spacious bike bag, and took it over to Jacob and Annette's place. Erin made some initial calls to let the relocation company know of our woes. John spent most of the afternoon on the phone with various people that were making attempts at getting in touch with the landlord. One of the real estate agents was able to get in touch with the landlord's mother, who instructed us to book a hotel room for the evening since the power was out. She also just happened to be flying in from the U.K. this evening and promised to come over as soon as possible. About 30 minutes later we were informed that the landlord was also flying in from Russia and he would be over soon to inspect the damage. How miraculous! After booking the hotel room and finishing a bit of work at the office, John went to the apartment to wait for the landlord to arrive.

So our landlord showed up at our apartment a bit before 7 p.m. to take a look at things. He was satisfactorily disgusted and awed at the situation. He flipped the breaker back on - yea, electricity! He told us the breaker would automatically shut off if something went wrong again, saving us from a fire hazard. He reassured us that he'd find someone who could come paint, but that he wanted to wait at least 2 weeks for everything to dry out.

Erin thoroughly washed and disinfected the bathroom and hall floors, and the kitchen floor just for good measure. John attempted to cancel our hotel reservation all to no avail. "It is not possible to cancel your reservation." John is becoming quite familiar with the popular Dutch phrase, "It is not possible." Unfortunately it really turned out to be impossible to cancel our reservation. The company who made the reservations for us apparently had to be the one to cancel the reservation and all those employees were comfortably at home watching TV by this time! Aarrgghhh. €99 down the drain, no pun intended.

The Coopers were gracious enough to feed us a Mexican dinner tonight, complete with surprisingly authentic chips and salsa. It's nice to have people around that appreciate Mexican food as much as we do.

Opening windows, doing laundry, and lighting candles is helping the smell. We also have a fan set up in the bathroom to aid in the drying process.

One thing can be said: Our life is never boring. :-)