It’s day 2 of an annual boys’ weekend in our household, as Brandy is well north of here for her October girls’ shopping weekend ritual.
These weekends are usually pretty easy. We eat lots of food that Mom would never touch, stay up past normal bed times, undertake a few activities and excursions, and scurry to clean up on Sunday to make sure Mom doesn’t come home to piles of laundry and dishes.
This morning, though, presented me with a unique challenge.
“Dad?”
I roll over, glance at the clock and see that it’s 6:45. They slept in! Glory be!
“Yes,” I murmur.
“Who forgot to flush?”
“Must have been you, Mason.”
“No!”
“Well, you were the one that got up to go to the bathroom last night.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t have diarreah.”
No one has been sick. What’s he talking about? Somewhere in the back of my mind, a Daddy instinct fires a synapse. Before coffee, even, which is how I know it”s an instinct and not a lucid thought, per se.
“Don’t flush now! It’s probably clogged!”
“OK.”
Crisis averted. I roll over to grab a few more winks while Mason crawls over to the side of the bed where Mom would normally be.
Squeak, thump, thump, thump, thump.
“Sam?”
Thump, thump, thump, squeak.
“SAM!” I’m fully awake now, Daddy synapses firing fast and furious now.
“Yeah?” he answers from behind the bathoom door.
“Use the downstairs bathroom, please! That toilet is probably clogged.”
“OK.”
Squeak, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.
I’m up now. I retrieve the plunger from the linen closet, wander down the hall, and start plunging.
Nothing happens, other than a lot of sloshing around the bowl.
I plunge some more. Still nothing. I try it again, this time twice as long.
There’s no change in the water level. And now I’m plunging and praying, praying and plunging, and getting the start of what could eventually become a big blister on my palm of my hand.
I’m now fearing the worst. Legos? Hot Wheels car? Socks? Benjamin has been changing his clothes every hour. Maybe because I scolded him about it yesterday he’s decided to hide the evidence and exact revenge?
Meanwhile, Benjamin is calling for his morning juice, and Mason wants to know when I’m going to start the French toast I promised the night before. I decide to take a plumbing break to tend to those needs, and do some quick Internet consultation.
Grab the cookbook, find the recipe, open the fridge, pull out eggs, butter and milk…. Milk? Where’s the milk? I really need coffee. Oh, yeah, the milk got finished at dinner last night.
So I have to run to the store. The boys have dug into Monopoly. Is it a full moon? They never play a board game first thing in the morning.
“Sam, you’re in charge. Watch your brothers. I’m just running to the store. I’ll be right back.”
But first, look under the sink. Do we have any Liquid-Plumr? No such luck.
Turns out to be good fortune. I jump online to figure out which version of the drain opener I should buy while I am picking up milk, only to learn that they don’t even try to fool you into buying it for toilet clogs: Clog removers are not designed to remove the waste that may be clogging your toilet.
So now I’m stumped. What if this thing is clogged beyond the capabilities of the plunger?
Reader’s Digest to the rescue. Two words give me hope: Toilet auger.
Of course, Stop & Shop doesn’t sell them — or at least doesn’t sell them in Sandwich. And it’s still too early for the hardware store to be open.
So with milk fetched, I return home to whip up breakfast. We all gather around the butcher block to enjoy the French toast made from leftover Brown Jug focaccia. Well, three out of four of us did. Benjamin stuck with his Pop Tart. He wanted nothing to do with the French toast.
After breakfast, I run back out to the hardware store.
“Uh, oh,” the clerk says as I plunk down the auger on the counter. “You have kids?”
“Sure do. How’d you guess?”
So he then tells me three stories about his grandchildren getting things stuck in the toilet. In one case, it was a whole roll of toilet paper. I must have turned three shades of white listening to the story.
“I guess I should feel pretty fortunate that this is the first time I’ve bought one of these in 11 years,” I tell the clerk.
He laughs. “Good luck!”
It still took me another half hour to get the auger to free up enough toilet paper so that the plunger finally worked. All that before 10 a.m.! A day filled with soccer is going to be such a breeze after all that activity this morning.
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Now playing: Temple Of The Dog – Pushin’ Forward Back
via FoxyTunes
