Who loves ya, Mr. B? Mommy, of course!
Mr. B is my middle child--pure joy as a personality. When he smiles, his whole face radiates happiness. When he's mad or sad, he wails with a loud fury. Mr. B gets along with both brothers, plays nicely and cooperatively, and excelled in preschool. He has a distinctive sense of fashion and has taken to wearing an old chain around his neck like some flashback from 1987. He's a snappy dresser, choosing dress shirts and polos where his older brother would only wear t-shirts with NO collars. When he was 3 he wore yellow rubber boots and a black cape everywhere we went.Mr. B is also imaginative and troublesome at times. Since he was 2 he's had "Issues" with water. He started by flushing toys down the toilet. Our house has 3 toilets. All 3 have had to be taken apart to retrieve a Robin action figure and 2 toy boats. All 3 receipts from Flush, the company hired to clean our pipes, are stored in his baby book. The total from Mr. B's Toilet Flushing Period was $489.72. You may well ask why we didn't just lock the toilets down. All the toilet latches are childproof and Mr. T (age 4 at the time) needed access to said potty chairs. We couldn't lock one kid out at the expense of the other. *sigh*
This spring Mr. B plugged the basement sink and let the water run all day before I went downstairs to feed the cat. I stepped in over an inch of standing water. Mr. B was lucky he was at preschool that afternoon or he might have ended up in the Emergency Room. He did this deliberately, knowing it was wrong even after I'd stopped him from flooding an upstairs bathroom earlier that same day. I spent a whole day mopping up water that had leaked through walls and soaked through carpets. That water flowed through Mr. D's Closet O' Crappe and everything needed airing out. *sigh*
You'd think the kid would learn.
Last Thursday I had a good thing going--the kids were playing upstairs, I had a fresh cup of coffee and blogs to read, I had a double batch of Lunchbox Cookies midway through their oven time and my chores were caught up for a few hours. Then Mr. T came downstairs. "Mom, I feel like I should tell you something."
Me: (a touch of impatience in my voice because doesn't he know I'm reading Minnesota Matron) "What?"
Mr. T: Oh, never mind.
Five minutes later.
Mr. T: (comes downstairs and sits on last step) "Mom I really feel like I should tell you something.
Me: (irritable because I'm reading Jenn at Juggling Life and I don't want to be interrupted) What? Mr. T if you have something to say, just say it. Otherwise leave me alone.
Mr. T scooted up the steps and in the sudden silence I heard water dripping. No, make that more of a steady splatter. What?
I stood up and recognized it came from the kitchen. I took 2 steps and froze. It was coming through the light fixture in the middle of the kitchen ceiling.
With the speed of a Cheetah, I sprinted upstairs and around the corner to discover a bathroom floor flooded with water and the overflowing toilet contributing to the problem. A toilet overflowing with brown sh*twater.
My shrieks and cursing pierced the air as I panicked. My skin crawled at the prospect of cleaning up the flecks of shredded toilet paper and poop particles. And it was flowing into my kitchen where cookies were baking. Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!
Who do you suppose kept on flushing despite the fact that nothing was going down? The one and only child with Issues. Mr. B.
Gathering old towels, I stopped the flow and shoved the water back, gagging on the smell as I did so. I'm a shade below Jen on the Edge when it comes to my Dirty Bathroom Reaction, but this was worse than the winter flu and potty training combined. Breathing through my mouth I tried to absorb the sh*twater pouring through the floorboards. Then I ran back to the boys' room to scream a little more. I returned to the bathroom fully armed with plunger, rags, rubber gloves and a bottle of bleach. It took hours. Cookies burned. Coffee cooled to a tepid temperature. My blood boiled.
By noon you could eat off of any surface in that bathroom and I tossed the empty bleach bottle in the recycling bin.
The electrician is coming at 4:30 today to fix the kitchen light. Guess where I'll file that receipt?
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