The fiasco of not having heat in the house with a 10 month old baby.

We woke up Tuesday morning to a bad, baaaad burning smell.  The heater, kaput.  Not good when the night prior it got down to 18 degrees. We turned off the heater.  The temperature slowly descended to about 45 degrees.  I believe the high that day was 33 degrees outside.

We call Skip The Furnace Guy.  Voicemail is full.  Not a good sign.  Call a little later and able to leave a pleading, begging message.  

I call back 4 hours later after not hearing anything.  Voicemail is full, again. Meanwhile Austin and I are losing feeling in our extremities. We finally reach our landlord who says he has Skip's number.  He was able to reach him via his private number.  Skip has 26 houses to service.  Fudge.

We end up hunkering down for the night with 3 space heaters.  If we turned on the TV and ran the three space heaters we tripped the breaker.  So, no TV or microwave.  I didn't like leaving the space heaters on overnight, so we ran Austin's in his room until we went to bed and made sure to wrap him in two blankets then turned off the his heater before we went to bed.  

The next morning was freezing cold.  I went in to get Austin and his hands and feet were so cold that I was sure CPS would come after me for not co-sleeping that night.  

We spent the 2nd day with no heat and it was miserable.  Thankfully, our neighbor Michelle offered for us to come over anytime to hang out and have a playdate.  We did.  We also decided to stay in a hotel that night because at that point I was just bitchy due to the freezingness in the house, trying to keep Austin warm and trying to find a furnace service company that wasn't booked out with a million houses to service.  

Austin did surprisingly well in the hotel, fell asleep on his own in the hotel's pack-n-play.  

The following three nights we checked in and out of two other different hotels trying to get a decent rate for our landlord as he was covering our stays.  What sucked was that Austin's nap time always landed in the middle of when we needed to check out of the hotel so he never got his two hour late morning naps.  He still did pretty well and he had a tooth come in.  

Finally, yesterday, Sunday at around 5pm we had heat.  After a two day installation and spending Sunday night in the freezing cold house (we were so tired of hotels) we had glorious heat.  Although, the smell from a new furnace isn't pleasant (we actually had to leave for a few hours and leave all the windows open in the house until it died down).  

Thank you to everyone that offered help and those we took help from!  May you never have to go without heat during the winter.