Oh what a day..

Today was good. Yesterday was… well, interesting. It was\’c3\’82\’c2\~a Monday. Monday is laundry day at my house, which I generally try to stick around for. This was an unusual Monday in that I was expecting my friend Mystie to come for a one-night trip that morning, so I was washing and drying the sheets in the basement bedrooms and running around vacuuming and generally trying to pretend that my house isn’t a mess on Monday mornings.\par
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Mystie’s arrival was imminent and I had just finished vacuuming the guest-room, when I caught the glint of water reflecting light on the small part of the bathroom floor I could see from a partially opened door. Groaning, I went to investigate and found a small puddle of water in the middle of the floor next to a rather gross looking toilet. Then, as Judah told his dad on the phone that evening, “Mommy put sugar [comet] in the potty, and flushed the poppy, and then the poppy started to spit all over the floor, and it made a big mess!!” If that doesn’t make sense to you, let me explain that I cleaned the toilet with comet, and just as I finished, Judah opened the shower door and said, “oh, Mommy, look” at which point I discovered gross scummy stuff all over the floor of the shower, looking relatively freshly wet. I flushed the potty (a bad idea, apparently), and was wondering what I was going to do about this situation, when Mystie called asking for directions. Somewhat flustered I started trying to help her over the phone, getting angrier and angrier with my small son who kept bugging me telling me something about the “poppy” (I was assuming he was still shocked by the mess in the shower.\par
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After I was off the phone I was “scolding” Judah, when, sobbing he said that there was water coming out of the “poppy” downstairs. I ran downstairs carrying him and sure enough, the toilet was backing up and there was a small lake of raw sewage on the bathroom floor.\par
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Anyway, you can imagine the phone calls: to the handy-man, to Roto-Rooter, and after Mystie showed up fresh from a 4 hour car trip, to my friend Alice to see if they could go over there, use their restrooms, and rest for the duration our our newest plumbing crisis. After I’d dispatched Mystie to Alice (whom she had never met – we had been planning on having a playdate in the afternoon so that they could meet each other in person), I sopped up some of the water (into a bucket – I couldn’t put it into the shower because it just backed up out of the toilet more) and fed the boys, and then we went over to Alice’s as well, to use the restrooms and just to avoid the crisis. She graciously fed 6 unexpected people lunch, and let Ezra take a nap in her guest room. I ran back and forth between her house and mine letting the Roto-Rooter people in and out, etc. In the midst of that I couldn’t find my keys and set my car alarm off, and was generally completely flustered and forgetting things constantly.\par
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After the mainline was cleared, Mystie returned to my house, bearing much appreciated mochas and a frozen dinner she’d brought from home. The rest of the afternoon consisted of toddler refereeing and then feeding them and putting them to bed before having our own dinner and drinking an entire bottle of froo-froo wine, again brought by Mystie (and she didn’t even know the day was going to be that hectic). Alice came over in the evening so that we could visit uninterrupted, and the day ended reasonably well.\par
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I tried to explain how God’s providence was involved in our plumbing disaster to Judah which lead to him having a few hilarious comments.\’c3\’82\’c2\~However,\’c3\’82\’c2\~I stayed up too late talking to my friend last night and I can’t write any more because my contacts are starting to bug me and I need to go to bed!\par
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