Apartment Living

Daily Specs:

Attainable Goal - Shave legs. Again. Apparently, that was unattainable yesterday.
Grievance - Boy Love's room is flooded again.
Celebration - My feet once again fit into my black ballet flats without spilling over the top. Perhaps my ankles will once again introduce themselves to society?

I have only been a mother of two for a very short time, but I am still appreciating the rare moments when both of my boys are sleeping. Unfortunately, naptime hours happens to coincide with the hours that the apartment maintenance makes house calls. As one who gets as much sleep as a mother of a newborn ever gets, I yearn for those naptime hours. Even with feedings, housework, and a quiet lunch, I still am able to get a decent little nap in when they sleep. Not so when there is maintenance to be done.

Our apartment is on top of a hill, which in theory is an excellent position to be in when those sudden rainshowers and thunderstorms hit our bright city. However, in execution, the position is far less desirable than we thought. While we are at the top of a hill, we are cleverly placed in a ditch, which quickly fills with water at any sign of precipitation. That, coupled with a giant crack in our foundation, leaves us wading in the soaked carpet of our back bedroom, aka Boy Love's room. After several rains, several phone calls to the office, and several fruitless attempts to suck the water out of the carpet, the apartment people are finally trying to address the bigger issues: the ditch and the foundation crack. Until this is done, our naptime hours are interrupted by a stream of phone calls and people coming in and out.

So I ask the office to phone me if work is going to be done, so I can make sure the back room is empty, the toys are picked up, and our nap is scheduled around the appointment for maximum quality sleep. And until today, I have turned away all service and maintenance people that are not preceded by a phone call. But after having a soaked carpet again all last night and today, it is time to let them in, phone call or not, no matter how much sleep we all lose.

So then begs the question: Is it a ridiculous request to continue to ask that the office calls before they send someone to pound on our door? I feel that this is a common courtesy, not just for service people, but for anyone visiting anyone else's private home. Since I have been turning people away, they have improved the amount of phone calls, but now that necessity has led me to let everyone in at any time, I feel the courtesy calls will stop. Every time someone comes through my door that has not let me know, I find myself trying to put away my milk-laden breasts mid-feeding, throw toys to the side for easy access to whatever room they need to attend to, or come to the door with my Baby Love's bare bottom covered in poo which I was attempting to clean up. On the other hand, it doesn't matter if social graces are used or not. They are here to fix one of my problems. I still need them to come in and fix. Do I insist on a phone call? Do I suck it up and learn to deal? Am I being selfish? Am I jsut playing the whistle-blower for social taboos?