They say that ignorance is bliss. If that is true, it must be true that ignorance is only bliss so long as you remain in ignorance. Once the ignorance is gone, so is the bliss.
One such moment in my life occurred last week.
I suppose many mothers of toddlers and babies have mornings similar to mine. Depending on the chosen order, each day consists of waking up, eating breakfast, sitting there enticing your toddler to eat, giving the baby a bottle, and eventually getting around to showering and getting dressed for the day.
Typically, I bring Baby Girl into the bathroom with me when I shower. Sometimes I lock the door to keep Little Man out, but most of the time I just leave it unlocked and he comes and goes as he pleases. But so long as Baby Girl is in the bathroom, I can at least hear if he is about to kill her. Most mornings, Little Man goes in and out of the bathroom half a dozen times in my 10-20 minute shower.
Last Thursday, however, he didn't come in at all. During the shower I was thinking how nice it was that he wasn't opening the door and letting all the heat out and that I was finally making it through a shower without Baby Girl getting tortured to death. I figured he was getting into a little bit of mischief, but for the moment....it was bliss ;) Little did I know what was waiting for me.
After exiting the shower, I decided I had better take a quick peak at what Little Man was up to before I got dressed. As I peaked through the doorway of the (other) bathroom, I noticed my Little Man happily watering the plants next to my kitchen sink. Then I noticed the water was spilling over the kitchen counter. I let my eyes follow the water down the counters, across the kitchen floor, through the laundry room and nearly to my feet. I was probably standing 40 feet from the kitchen sink. Apparently, Little Man had been watering my plants the ENTIRE time I was in the shower.
Needless to say, I got dressed in record speed that morning.
As I rushed back to the kitchen, I grabbed the mop. Yeah, that didn't work out so well as I quickly realized cleaning up all that water with the mop would probably take until Jake got home 7 hours later.
Next I reached for the dust pan and small broom and started sweeping up the water and dumping it in a bucket. That was definitely faster, but then I remembered we recently bought a wet/dry shop vac!!! I was saved! That would be so much faster!
I rushed downstairs to grab it. But wait, what was that strange sound I heard as I got to the bottom of the stairs....it sounded like DRIPPING!!!!
Oh no! It was dripping! The water was flowing into the heat ducts and dripping from the kitchen and bathroom into the downstairs bathroom and spare bedroom. I grabbed the shopvac, ran back upstairs, and put towels over the heating vents....hopefully that would stop/slow the dripping into the (totally finished) basement.
Now I had one more problem, I had never used the shopvac for wet clean up. I knew I had to do something different than for dry clean up, but what was it???? There was no way I would have time to FIND and READ the instructions.
Thank heaven for Father-in-laws! I called Jake's dad and he was able to tell me what do to....he was also able to take a break from work and come up and hold Baby Girl and keep Little Man from traipsing through the 1/4 inch of water covering nearly a quarter of my upstairs floor.
After about 45 minutes of vacuuming up the water, I finally had it cleaned up enough that air drying was a possibility and was able to focus on the other things that needed attention....like the water that had dripped downstairs. Thankfully, nearly all of that had gone to the the bathroom, which has linoleum flooring. The other vent had miraculously dripped onto a table instead of soaking the carpet.
With the more urgent matters taken care of, I noticed and was able to attend to one last item that needed attention: cleaning the soil off the counter-top, walls, and cupboards where it had either been sprayed to in some volcanic like explosion when Little Man put the sprayer in the plant or flowed to as the water cascaded over the edge of the counter.
Gratefully, the experience is over now and is something I have no trouble laughing about. However, I'm not really sure that the 20 minutes of bliss in the shower was worth the hour plus of clean up time.
