In the which I get good news...and bad news

When: Saturday, 2:45am
Where: LoLo Lodge

At 2:45am, Baby Ying Ying woke up to eat. No huge news there - Mama is getting a lot less sleep these past few weeks. Not much I can do about that.

At about 2:50, I hear beeping. Not a steady beeping - a random beeping. Sometimes a few beeps close together. Sometimes just one beep. Then the pattern repeats. My pulse picked up. It sounded, honestly, like someone trying to guess the code on the keypad locking the door between the garage and the house. Knowing there was a really, really excellent chance I was wrong, I tried not to freak out. I fed the baby for a few more minutes, listening to the beeping, before she got to a point where we could take a break. I quickly put her back into her crib and hustled into my own room to grab a robe. Again, I was fairly certain there were no intruders, so I didn't wake up Lo Gung. Just me and my robe, creeping around the house at 3 in the morning, pulse racing.

I went downstairs, and could immediately tell the beeping wasn't coming from the garage. Good news. It was coming from the kitchen. Bad news. The oven was beeping, with an error code lit up on one side of the display. I cleared the screen, but the beeping continued. Random. Absolutely guaranteed that I wouldn't be able to sleep through that. (Besides, a friend of mine found her oven off, and about 400 degrees, late one night last week. I wasn't going to take any chances with a possessed oven. At least my pulse started to slow down. Now I was just annoyed - my oven was obviously malfunctioning (which could be very costly to fix) and I couldn't go to bed until I made it quiet again. I thought for a moment, and then heard my Dad's voice in my head. "Just go flip the breaker!" So I did. Killed power to the oven, oven was quiet, I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Then I realized I still needed to finish feeding the baby. Back up to her room, let her eat for a while, all thoughts of intruders and faulty ovens banished from my mind. When I finally lumbered back to my bed, it was 4am. The baby, of course was back up at 6 am. Because life is totally fair like that. Fortunately, baby's Daddy is an absolute rockstar. He brought her into our bed for her breakfast, and then took her downstairs so I could sleep for another two and a half hours. I decided to just leave the oven off. I didn't need to use it, and didn't have time to mess with it, so what was the point?

Of course, Daddy can't resist a project. So, Sunday after church, he flipped the breaker. No beeping! Warmed the oven up to 325. Totally got hot! Then Daddy went to bed for an afternoon nap.

Now? I'm sitting here on the floor, writing a silly story about a possessed oven, listening to my baby fuss and blow raspberries next to me...all narrated by a random beeping in the background.

*sigh*