Celebrating

I know it seems like I'm avoiding the whole 'photo posting' thing right now, but if you could please tell my children to stop being asses, I'd be a lot further along in the game right now. Today is Eli's third birthday, and the plan was to get everyone bathed, dressed, and out the door, go into the shop to see if Mandi had pulled her own hair out yet whilst "reorganizing" the yarn area, then we'd all walk over to the toy shop and let Eli choose a birthday gift. After that, we'd get some helium balloons, then pick up his cake from Emma's Bakery, head home, and eat our way into glycemic shock. A perfect day, by my reckoning.

Alas, what actually happened was this: As I sat with my second mug of decaf (the morning had gotten off to an early start with a backache that drove me from my bed), Lillian came downstairs wailing that the upstairs toilet was running over. As I tore up the stairs, I shouted for Madeleine to grab the bleach and rubber gloves, Lilly was to get towels, and the boys were to tell me if it started leaking through to the dining room. I stompered the toilet, mopped up poop-swill, bleached and scrubbed the toilet, floor, and surrounding walls, and after gathering up all the cleaning apparatus, came down the stairs to find...
a steady stream of water leaking from out of the woodwork onto Eli's chair, soaking the rug, and pooling into the kitchen.
So much for the plans of mere mortals. I screamed at my heedless children about their excessive wadding of toilet tissue, their lack of respect for having their own damn bathroom (which I would have given an eye for as a kid), and about the general disarray of the upstairs, which I've decided is no longer tolerable, even if I do refuse to haul myself upstairs to look at it. We will be ripping out our downstairs bathroom soon, due to a faulty bit of tile work that has created a much larger problem with the sub flooring, and the upstairs has to be better. I'm not letting the little shits force me into a heart attack over their bad bathroom habits. That's my morning in a big, bloggy nutshell. I'm off to check the dripping woodwork and start another bleach load of towels. Have a better day than me, please.

p.s. A beautiful deer just walked right past our front windows, across the driveway, and into the blackberry brambles that separate our front yard from the neighbors. It would seem the 'no-mow' treatment has additional benefits, besides the bounty of bunnies in the yard, the foxes out back, and the wild turkey who walked right up to our back porch last week. Ah, wilderness.