Decibel Test

The past few nights have been a little rough. Sadie is nursing a cold, so she hasn't been sleeping very well, and she ends up crying for loooooooooooong stretches. And Sadie's cry is especially pathetic so it's hard to do what we think is the right thing and let her fall back asleep on her own. Jake is still sleeping well, but now it takes twice as long to put him to bed because he can get up on his own and comes up with all these excuses like "I have to go potty" or "I need my truck" or "I just need to check CNN to see the primary results in South Carolina".

But last night, Sadie seemed to be feeling a little better, and actually took quite a few steps on her own. She went right down after her little workout -- and Jake went down on the first try! So, we enjoyed our 45 minutes of quiet before going to bed ourselves, and crossed our fingers that we'd have an uneventful night.

It turns out, there is something louder and more ear-piercing than Sadie's wailing. Wait for it, wait for it................a JACKHAMMER! That's right, at exactly 3:00am, we were awoken to the rattling of a jackhammer on our quiet little hilltop in Falls Church. There was a whole crew out there: front end loader, dump truck, generator truck, etc. We were so tired that we probably could have slept through a constant jack-hammering, but we weren't that lucky. They apparently had to cut 5,000 little holes in the street that involved all kinds of stop-start jack-hammering. It lasted over an hour. Luckily, and ironically, the kids slept through.

I guess it was a water main break. In the morning all our pipes had some air in them, and we saw evidence of a small river that must have flowed down the street.

Decibel levels (for comparison)

softest audible sound	0 dB
normal breathing	10 dB
whispering	25 dB
normal conversation	60 dB
dishwasher	65 dB
busy traffic	75 dB
noisy restaurant	80 dB
average factory	85 dB
screaming baby	90 dB
subway train	100 dB
power mower	105 dB
shouting in ear	110 dB
live rock music	90-130 dB
football stadium	117 dB
car horn	120 dB
jackhammer	130 dB
air raid siren	130 dB