Regale me with tales of laughter, no heating, no hot water and

[bloodywhitecat]

A small baby, DP is on chemo, the front garden is under water snow is forecast this weekend.

Honestly, 2020 was a crap year, DP was diagnosed with cancer after a fight, then he was told he has six months to live (but he has his fingers in his ears to that bit and isn't listening to the doom mongers). He had part of his stomach and pancreas removed along with his duodenum only to be told it had spread to his liver.

Now the boiler has stopped working. Again. Our landlady is on the case as she would rather her plumber deal with it than the lot that the letting agent uses (they made the problem worse last time and her man had to sort it out) but now it has died again with snow forecast for the weekend. Luckily for some strange reason I decided to bath the baby this morning rather than his usual evening bath...maybe the boiler objected???

Tell me a tale to cheer me up?

Not sure I can cheer you up with all that going on but you and your DP sound amazing.

Thank you.

Our landlady rocks, the plumber has just arrived. I know some people who rent have poor landlords/letting agents but our landlady is the salt of the earth, she really is.

So hopefully boiler fixed before teatime and you can snuggle in for the weekend. So sorry you are dealing with incurable cancer, which I lost my DW to 7 months ago. All that helped was letting friends and family support us and just trying to enjoy every day ordinary things, the peace bits, funny bits, the every day shared bits in between the awfulness. Sending you .

Yes your landlady sounds a treasure. Hopefully you will be able to enjoy the snow through the window in a toasty house, which is the best way in my view.

Spring is around the corner, bulbs flowering, longer warmer days, birds building nests, and your baby growing and learning new things, eating new things, and doing all the funny things that babies do.

Oh crumbs. Sounds like your landlady has her head on straight though, which makes all the difference.

The house we lived in when DS was born was a bit knackered throughout - loose floorboards here and there, old plaster, drafty sash windows that rattled in anything more than a stiff breeze... We had boiler problems every winter, apparently because the boiler was some obsolete piece of crap that it was impossible to find replacement parts for without importing them from Poland but the LL refused to replace it. The winter when it finally gave up completely DS and I were fresh home from hospital, I'd had next to no sleep and the plumber spent at least two weeks trying to fix it before declaring it dead. At one point he was tinkering around trying to fit something to something else and muttered something about needing to grease a nipple.

I shuffled out of the bedroom holding a still-cluster-feeding DS, chucked him a tube of Lansinoh and said 'it's alright, we know how to look after nipples around here' Poor man...

My tale is similar to yours (without the malfunctioning boiler though)!

Small baby, DH with terminal cancer (but ignoring the doctors predictions), amazing landlord. Chaos followed us wherever we went! 😆

Although it can be shit, life does go on and get better. Also, with summer on the way boilers won't be as important! 😂

If you were close by, I'd drop by to give you some help and hope. 💐💐💐💐

Thank you for the tales of hope and similarities, @Gliblet made me laugh in particular. A bit has broken off, some sort of valve or something, the plumber can get one for tomorrow. The baby is awake now and rolling around the floor, we foster him and like DP he is oblivious to medical prognosis, he has a brain injury but no-one seems to have told him he is not supposed to be able to be rolling around like he is!

I fell over a couple of days ago.
I was taking my dog for his last walk around the block. He poo’d which he has to back up to do. I bent over to bag it, he walked behind me and nudged my knees.
Arse over tit I went down like a sack of shit.
Because it had been raining and the front garden was slippery I couldn’t push down because of the mud.
It took me a good 5 minutes to get up.
OP, you are a wonder. Have a great weekend

The year my eldest was born (now 40 years ago!) was one of the coldest on record. Our old house had no central heating, just a gas fire in the living room. So cold the pipes froze in the kitchen and the bucket of terry towelling nappies iced up in the bathroom. I slept on a rug in front of the has fire with newborn dd until the cold snap passed.
I know you'll get through this, sending love your way x

For our DD's first Christmas I booked an old cottage large enough for both sets of GPs, Aunties etc and us to stay in. The day we were supposed to go, there had been snow and ice so my parents went as the advance party. The main heating was from a log fire which worked well, although the pipes had frozen so until they thawed, we were boiling saucepans in the kitchen. On the plus side, DD's Christmas present was a great inflatable duck bath so could bath her in the warm too.

Parents had carefully hidden various rather eyebrow raising paintings and also some magazines in bedside drawers that definitely had not been placed by the Gideons. When we got there, there was a large chest in one room that had a Christmas tree on it. At one point DAunt said something like 'Oh, I wonder what's in there'. Looked, and genuinely...it was whips and chains. The guestbook was a little enigmatic too (fortunately somewhat ambiguous).
Not what I'd wanted for baby's first Christmas!

Wishing @Spaghettio and yourself the best of luck and strength at this difficult time.

@billy1966 thank you. I'm 12 years on now, remarried, 2 step DC, a DC with my new husband (a widower) and my great hulking 12 yo DS. Life moves on, never quite how you imagine it.