Change the Batteries!

Team DeBoer's Lessons Learned Journal entry number... what are we up to now? 102? Last Saturday night before Shawn and I went to bed, I noticed our thermostat read "bat low." I remember thinking... hmmm, I wonder how long we have to change the batteries before it dies. That question must have lingered for all of one minute because we went to bed that night without thinking about it again.

At about 3am, Norman started whining and pacing around his room so I got up to let him out. As he was out doing his business, I went to the bathroom to do mine and I'm not kidding you, I sat my butt down on what felt like popsicles! It was intensely cold. Everything felt like it was under a layer of ice; the floor, the tile, the bedding, the sheets. Since it's normally pretty cold in our house at night, I groggily shrugged it off, put Norman back in and happily hurled myself back under the five layers of bedding.

At about 5am, Norman started whining and pacing around his room again. This time Shawn emerged from our heated cocoon to let him out. I don't remember having a conversation with him about the shear frigidness that was lurking in the house, but I do remember rolling over to fall back asleep and landing on what felt like a wet towel in place of my pillow. After the heat from my head melted into my pillow, the wet towelness faded and it became tolerable once more. So again, we fell back asleep.

At about 9am, Norman was ready to be up. We awoke to find him doing the usual whining and pacing but this time he was a bit more muffled. He was harder to hear because now even our heads were buried under the covers. We were like, okay, maybe something is really wrong and we should choose a solution over sleep. I got up, opened the battery compartment on the thermostat and read that when this "bat low" appears, we have 2 months to change the batteries before they die. Feeling safe in my assumption that this was a crock of crap, I found 2 AA batteries and gave 'er a go. When the little monitor came back to life it displayed the current temperature in our house. It was 45 degrees. Now, it's cold in our house at night when we put it at 62 degrees but again, it was 45 degrees, that's 17 degrees below what was already uncomfortably cold!

Ironically, we felt lucky that it didn't get even colder then that resulting in a pipe bursting or something similar. It took a good hour I'd say to heat the place back up to tolerable. We'd check it every 10 minutes or so only to find the temperature had raised one single, solitary degree. Let this be a lesson to all you out there experiencing the lovely weather this winter. Check your batteries!

P.S. I secretly think Norman was up twice during the night (instead of sleeping all the way through like normal) because even he could tell something wasn't right and he wanted to make sure we were okay. Shawn's a bit more skeptical based on Norman's somewhat unintelligent track record.