Blends With Savanna Grasses

Yes, we had another dreaded bathroom toilet leak last night.

Y'see, this is actually the good Lord's way of keeping me humble. I'd been feeling pretty good about the job I'd been doing as Mr. Mom lately. None of the kids had been late to school, missed an appointment, went hungry, or lacked for clean clothes, towels, or linens. I was starting to feel, well, that I had a bit of control over the domestic agenda. But the Lord likes to keep us from getting big heads, so he sent this specific tribulation my way. Here's the story...

We'd had a very full and busy day. After church in the morning, where Anna Lynn's best friend Zoe had turned her head into multi-megawatt static electricity generator, we headed out for a day of adventure.

There's not too much true adventure to be had with a cadre of little girls, so that meant Green Hills Mall and the best Santa in town. A quick detour home was needed to get some anti-itch medicine for Anna Lynn and to give Dylan a buzz and pick him up from his buddy Ian's house.

We got some fantastic pictures. (Hehe! You'll probably be seeing those as our Christmas cards.) But sadly, I can't read the disk they burned for me with the JPEG files on it. So I can't post the picture(s) here until I rescan the photo though I'll put one down that I took with my phone.

All of my kids are fantastic. I know that because I stood in line for 45 minutes and watched the behavior of other people's children. Thank you God for these kids! Emily happily entertained Katie Jo and Anna Lynn and lots of other kids by drawing with them. And when KJ or Anna would get bored, Dylan would liven things up with some rough and tumble. They had a ball and made the time in line go pretty fast.

(And I have to give credit where it is due. Emily and Dylan have been a big help in general lately.)

Can you see Anna Lynn's facial features through Dylan's shirt? They really had a lot of fun playing. They were cracking me up along with everyone else in line.

After Santa, I took the kids for their first Cheesecake Factory experience. The food there is good and the cheesecake is, of course, fan-freakin-tastic. Now I've been to a half-dozen Cheesecake Factories around the country and some how NONE of them have less than an hour wait - even at 4:30 in the PM! Grrrrr....

So when we finally got home, Dylan rushed up stairs to his bathroom and promptly clogged the Mt Juliet sewer and septic system with an 18' 7" turd anaconda named Wallace. The kids toilet upstairs, for some reason, fills very quickly. Consequently, when it overflows, it only takes a couple minutes to have 2" of water in the bathroom. (Note that I have indeed turned down the water pressure on that toilet!) Anyway, Dylan, Emily, and I swung into action. I fixed the toilet (and had to wash my hands about 30 times afterwards). Dylan sopped up the water. Emily placed bowls strategically to catch all the drips. And I also had to rush Katie Jo and Anna Lynn to my bed so they wouldn't be awakened by dripping anaconda water.

On the other hand, an interesting sidebar here is that ceilings make great water filtration systems. The leaking water upstairs was not, ahem, very clean since Wallace didn't willingly vacate the premises. However, the water that collected in all the bowls downstairs was crystal sparkly clean. I saved some for you if you want to give it a taste test. C'mon, you know you wanna!

So our efforts prevented a potential catastrophy. But now, I had lots and lots of new towels and bowls to wash. Thank you, Lord, for reminding me of my place in the world - up to my elbows in ickiness with hampers full of laundry awaiting.

Despite all of the excitement, I have to say that it was a wonderful weekend.

Cheers!

-Zebraman

# posted by Zebraman @ 5:21 PM