How my son managed to simultaneously flood two bathrooms before breakfast
Today was one of those days where I really wish I could have gone back to bed and have a do-over. The entire day was a comedy of errors and frustrations and me being short-tempered and it all started like this:
I was downstairs getting ready to make breakfast when I heard water running in the downstairs bathroom. I was the only one down there, so the sound baffled me. I went to investigate and discovered water dripping from the light fixture! I ran upstairs and saw T in his room getting dressed. I asked him if he’d used my bathroom and he said yes. I was really tempted to swear right then. I raced to the master bath where I actually did swear--which I do so rarely it might as well be never. There was ½ an inch of water covering the entire bathroom floor and it was starting to seep into the hallway carpet.
How did this happen? Well the toilet is stupid. No really, it is. See, when you flush it, you have to wait until the bowl is empty, then you have the jiggle the handle a few times otherwise water will start spewing from the tank. Apparently, if you let it do that for a minute or more, it floods the whole bathroom and then leaks from the ceiling of the bathroom below it.
It took me an hour and at least 15 towels to clean up both bathrooms. Meanwhile, I’m trying to get a hold of Chriss to tell him what happened and ask how he wants me to handle the carpet and if he’ll be okay with me just washing the towels or if I should just get all new ones since they'd been soaked in toilet water. It took me 4 calls before he finally answered. By then, I had the whole thing under control and was 75% done cleaning. But before I could tell him as much, he said he was on his way and hung up on me.
By the time he got home, all I had left to do was sweep and mop the upstairs bathroom and start the first of what ended up being 7 loads of laundry. But he insisted that it was good that he’d come home because he needed to fix the toilet so this wouldn’t happen anymore. And while he was at it, he wanted to fix the leaky bathroom sink, too. Suffice it to say that took all day and involved a lot of frustration (to put it mildly) on his part, but he did it.
Meanwhile, I think I deserve the super mom award (even though I did lose my temper a few times) because with all this going on, I still managed to get 2 1/2 hours of school in for T. After getting the initial water mopped up, I stopped long enough to give him some independent work (math sheets that he could figure out on his own, spelling practice, art, and science games on the computer). He did all that while I finished cleaning, showered, made out my grocery list, and grabbed a yogurt for breakfast. I also got the shopping done (which really needed to be done and wasn't easy because someone decided to whine and argue with me about everything) and then I went to the vet (which is 20 mintues away) to pick up Pumpkin and Stormy because we got them declawed. What I didn't have to do was cook because my wonderful husband went and got pizza for dinner. Okay, it's not exactly healthy, but today, I really didn't care.