Lucky us, though, "deal with" means "call a dude." So we did. Then we hunkered down downstairs, which has a separate AC system that was still working. (Also, the downstairs AC runs on Celsius, while the upstairs runs on Fahrenheit. Kind of weird, right?) We each took a couch and tried to stay awake while the AC guy did his thing. After an hour or two, I went up to doze in the girls' room so I could a) doze, and b) keep an eye on how the temperature was feeling up there. (It was warm and getting warmer.)
As I dozed, I recalled something I had almost completely forgotten about in the post-baby haze that has obscured much of the last year. One of the first nights that Sterling and I were home from the hospital, the power went out in the middle of the night for a few hours. The broken...whatever it is that breaks when the power goes out, was very near our house. It was 2am and I could see guys with flashlights in the alley outside my bedroom window. I was desperately tired, but it was too warm to sleep and I was worried about my precious tiny sleeping baby overheating. We pulled out our rechargeable fan and pointed it at Sterling, but the hours dragged on and the charge ran out and the power stayed off.
When he woke up, I changed his diaper and fed him by the glow of my laptop screen. He slept again, but I could not. I drifted in and out of rest, listening to the men banging around with their flashlights and tools in the alley. I hoped and prayed with all the energy I could muster that they would get it fixed soon.
The power came back on after almost four hours and that was the end of it.
Those first nights that you're home with a new baby are so disorienting anyway; the lack of AC, light, and water (because when our power goes out, so does the water) took that up a notch. I'm glad it was just the AC last night (and in many ways, that Sterling is no longer a newborn).
The AC was fixed after a couple of hours last night, and we got a good block of sleep in before morning.