Toilet Bowl Blunders
In researching images for this article, I stumbled upon this jewel of the internet called "Adventures in Toilet Flushing." http://m.pandawhale.com/post/6374/adventures-in-toilet-flushing This website left me howling with laughter and tears streaming down my cheeks. After this highly scientific video evidence, I have concluded...I bought the WRONG toilet. This also includes the cartoon from my youth that leaps to mind every time I have to rigorously plunge.

I reseated my toilet for the third time since the dawning of this new year. I am starting to wonder if I shouldn't get a contractor's discount and just buy wax ring kits in bulk, because we have to completely dismantle the commode on a fairly regular basis in search of whatever object has blocked the escaping of unwanted materials. Unfortunately, the culprit is usually not of an organic nature. I would like to be able to accuse our toilet woes on overenthusiastic wipers, but alas some children need to be reminded to perform that operation altogether, and others of them choose to bypass taking it off the roll in double ply streamers and just drop the unused cylinders in whole.

I have had three different mothers this week pose the inexplicable question of where the spoons from their homes went. One mother actually wondered if they went the same place that single socks do. I do not really venture to guess where spoons go when they disappear from this realm of existence, but I will tell you that this most recent occurrence, when the toilet vomited its undesirable contents all over the floor, a lone spoon sat glimmering in the depths— daring my germophobic self to extricate it from the murky waters. I plucked it like a hot coal from its odorous resting place and flung it into the bathtub behind me. I covered the offending utensil in bleach, cleansed it with scalding hot water, and threw it in the garbage just to be safe. If you also are finding a notable lack of food-shoveling implements, perhaps you should check the plumbing.

Our toilet began protesting our family's abuses about two years ago when the first IFO (identifiable flushed object) strangled our plumbing. Due to chronic skin maladies and my unhealthy obsessive need for overachieving, I have always made my own soap from scratch. Yes, I know....totally weird, but decadent and effective. During one of my frequent bouts of being overextended and exhausted, I chose to buy a case of green-hued soap that claimed, once upon a time on television, to make Irish people sing under waterfalls. My eldest minion is very particular about....well....everything. I unsheathed the rectangle of emerald perfumey goodness and placed it gingerly on the dish built into our tub. When I went to shower, the rectangle was inexplicably missing. So, I unwrapped another and placed it in its place of honor. The next day it also had been sucked into a vacuum. On my third attempt, my toilet began mysteriously cascading over the shiny barriers of the rim. I plunged until I could plunge no more. I purchased a toilet snake (I had never heard of such a thing before), but to no avail. I finally hired a plumber. He removed my toilet and retrieved from the depths beneath my tile, a vaguely rectangular not exactly green object that I recognized immediately. I was amazed. Apparently soap gets gummy and squishy during a ten minute shower, but can last several days under a constant barrage of flushing without softening or passing through to freedom.

 

I was comforted a few short weeks later when my dear neighbor called and reported that her porcelain throne had suffered a similar fate. Her well-intentioned, but bored, seven-year-old child had decided to play “flush the Hotwheels car.” Apparently Hotwheels made their cars wonderfully flushable, but not parentally steppable (see our January 9, 2013 post about Parental Pain Scales.) After exhausting his die-cast supply of vehicles he decided that writing implements seemed innocuous enough to make the journey through the pipes. After flushing one plastic pen, the toilet gave up the battle and began its watery protest. When confronted about the incident, the child responded with “It said it was disposable on the side.” His mother, though slightly soggy, had to accept that as a relatively logical defense.

So, I now begin listing things that through my scientific study and a plethora of rubber gloves and hand sanitizer I have found to be non-flushable. (How is it that non-flushable is rejected by my spell-check, but non-uncrushable is an acceptable replacement?) Toilet paper rolls if stocked with more than a quarter of a roll of product are rejected by most lavatories. Marbles though small, are too dense to be carried away with the current and then either sit glinting and decorative in the bottom of the privy or require unpleasant retrieval by someone other than myself. Toothbrushes make about half the journey before proving too rigid and may take some muscle to extract. Baby wipes, single paper towels, plastic Easter eggs, make-up brushes, cotton swabs, toothpicks, marshmallows in small groups are all fairly benign in descending down the catacombs of the W.C. Don't ask me how I know, but through familial proof, dentures are amazingly flushable and truly difficult to retrieve. (The family resemblance is extremely shaky after that, as the wearer of these chompers washed them and continued using them after sending her hubby to retrieve them from the septic system. I may be frugal, but I don't think even I am that frugal. The moral of this crappy tale is to remove your dentures BEFORE you toss your cookies).

As I have mentioned before, my family suffers from an amazing plethora of skin maladies, so therefore I must purchase make-up that nearly defies budget or face my life as a splotchy ogre. Though I have abandoned beige tubes of foundation that cost as much as one month's insurance on all three of my vehicles, merely because it has vacationed (however briefly) in the bowl of the facilities.

How is it that we have the technology to speak to people face-to-face on other continents, we can carry the entire library of congress in a computer the size of a paperback book, we can clap our hands and turn on a light across the house, we have robots that sweep our floors and torment our house cats, but we cannot have a smart filtering toilet that only allows #1 and #2 to enter its depths? (patent pending) Sounds like a corporate conspiracy among plumbers to me.

Toilet euphamisms rejected for this MoM outburst: Powder room (mostly because mine has been dusted in a variety of powders and the nomenclature is offensive to me), washroom, the restroom (parents all know that there is very little resting that occurs in this room), little boy/girl's room, the can, the John, the privy, the oval office (I rejected this, because too much crap happens in the real geographical location), the loo (which I personally use quite frequently, but it is unrecognized by most Americans), the smallest room in the house, and the comfort station.

A Sprinkling of Karma
This week I am writing in remembrance of my old toilet seat and in salutation of the new. With five little boys, toilet seats are as disposable as.....toilet paper. I just ask myself, “Is this disgusting, disease-infested, vomit-inducing, light-your-body-on-fire-and-extinguish-it-with-bleach-type of cleaning worth the $20 it would take to buy a brand new one?” For this OCD-stricken mom, the answer is generally a resounding, “ HEAVENS NO!”

When I was growing up, my grandmother had a very peculiar sense of interior decorating. This was especially true when it came to her bathroom, This sense of style is likely because of her ten darling grandchildren, a staggering eight of them were male.

One day in our ceramics class, my grandmother was struck with the overwhelming importance of a message engraved on an unpainted plaster plaque. She was immediately compelled to by truth and import of this greeting, purchased it, instructed me to paint it quickly. She proudly posted this plaque on the wall directly opposite the toilet. The plaque was charmingly shaped like a toilet seat, painted (through my artistic vision) a glowing orchid purple and read in gigantic capital letters, “If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie and wipe the seatie.” As one of the few females using her facilities, I found this rhetoric disgusting and preferred to carry out my business with my eyes shut to avoid the humiliation of reading about sprinkling or tinkling.

Apparently, karma has a twisted sense of humor. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of parental karma, I will define it. Karma is the cosmic principle that ensures that if you ever used the commode at your grandmother's house with your eyes closed to avoid thinking about boys peeing on the toilet seat, the cosmos will give you FIVE bouncing baby boys as a nagging reminder of this principle. Yes, I have FIVE little sprinklers and tinklers and the thought of that orchid-hued, plaster toilet seat haunts me several times daily.

There have been days of my life that I will use the restroom at our local Walmart because the chances are good that they are less disease-ridden than the one awaiting me at home. I find myself often doing the “tip-toe and levitate maneuver.” I am sure that everyone is familiar with this prim little dance. The one you do on the tops of your tennis shoes when you enter a public toilet that you are sure has hatched more bacteria in the past 20 minutes than Sir Alexander Fleming did in a lifetime. The dance starts with a staccato halt at the doorway and the dramatic realization that you must dance on the tips of your toes like a ballerina to minimize the amount of surface area in contact with the offending facility. Upon reaching your destination, you remove all but the calculated necessary amount of toilet paper from the roll and proceed to wrap (without directly touching) the toilet like a present for Christmas morning. The choreography then calls for you to levitate your body six inches from any surface and finish your biological business quickly. After which, you use only your elbows to wash with scalding hot water (though no soap because these kinds of facilities have a philosophical aversion to the stuff) and exit the room. I personally then use scented hand sanitizers till my pores sting and I smell like I am imbibed with alcohol.

Not wanting to be so crude as to mention the sprinkling and tinkling in my decorating, I chose a more elegant and biblical approach. I called it “The Potty Proclamation.” I actually had a friend think that they were making an amazing revelation when they noted the similarity to the ten commandments. I informed him that it was indeed by design, because the disregard for these commandments may bring down a wrath of biblical proportions. The Proclamation was posted in our home for over a year and the offending behaviors ceased, so it was removed in favor of a beautiful picture of a tulip.

Well folks, the tulip is on hiatus, and The Proclamation is back in its place of honor. I have received great compliments on my commandments, so I will share.

It is prefaced with: “Woe be unto the filthy for they shall be beaten heavily with whatever Mommy deems sufficient until the germ-ridden devil is cleansed from their soul.”

1. Thou shalt not forget to flush
   Might I mention that my little group of monsters are certifiably genius. I am not saying that as a proud mother, I am saying that as someone who thwarts their attempts at world domination on a daily basis. I can truthfully say, I have a brilliant group of little minds. So WHY can they not master the function of the LITTLE PLASTIC LEVER!?! (there is that interrobang again, Honey!) I have noticed that the concept of flushing the toilet and the satisfying gurgle and swish that accompany it, is absolutely enthralling to small children. But the function and operation of the device falls out of their heads once they are potty trained, as if there just isn't enough room for both pieces of information.
2. If thou art male, thou shalt SIT to use the facilities.
   My male friends who have read my proclamation are scandalized by this! They believe that I am robbing my boys of some male right of passage or something. I attribute this to my mother-in-law. My darling husband is the oldest of three children, the younger two being sisters. He therefore, was encouraged to abandon his manly right to urinate from the upright position for the greater good. Yup ladies, I married the perfect guy. He cooks, he cleans, and he NEVER leaves the lid up. I am not suppressing my sons' natural instincts or the snow-inspired artistic tendencies, I am merely making them marketable for their future wives.
3. Thou shalt remove all items from the floor before leaving this room.
   This is self-explanatory. If an article of clothing is moist and on the bathroom floor, I don't want to have to question whether the moisture is from splashing or from overzealous sprinkling and tinkling.
4. Thou shalt not waste toilet paper.
   Being a homeschooling family, I have found that there are offensive behaviors inherent in a public school situation that have gratefully skipped my children. Creative uses of toilet paper is not among those lists of elusive behaviors. The worst is when I am perched helplessly on the throne with an empty cardboard cylinder on the sproingy thing to my left and four or five plush wads sneering at me from their cemented home on the ceiling.
5. Thou shalt replace the toilet paper on the roll when the previous is void of product.
   Fairly self-explanatory, but we have all done the solitary dance that is less tip-toeing and more reminiscent of a sumo wrestler in trying to retrieve a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom closet, which is within view, but just out of reach.
6. Thou shalt not part the Red Seas in the bathtub, allowing it to spill its banks.
   Again, I remind you that I have little maniac genius babies, but somehow they can calculate the amount of magnesium needed to light a small fire, but cannot calculate the maximum volume allowed in our bathtub to minimize the spillage. Additionally, my bathroom is tiled in lovely beige tile with grout that acts as aqueducts in carrying any small amount of water through a series of canals all the way out through the outer bathroom and into the wood-floored hallway an impressive ten feet away.
7. Thou shalt use thine own towel and return it promptly to the assigned hook.
   I am repeatedly asked, mostly by my mother when she visits my house, if I actually OWN towels. The answer is a resounding YES! I have a gaggle of towels, a legion, a myriad, quite nearly a googleplex of drying implements. Amazingly, I post the towels at their station each laundry day and within mere seconds, they have been swallowed by the black hole in my bathroom. I am increasingly tired of choosing between the drip-dry method or the hippy-wiggle dance from trying to put on jeans when wet.
8. Thou shalt return the magazines and reading material to the provided receptacle.
   Refer to the above theory on moisture. A mysteriously moist magazine should require incineration, just to be safe.
9. Thou shalt not bathe anything but thyself and thy pet in the bathtub.
   I am also the mother of two beautiful little dogs and although I sanction the use of the bathtub for bathing and grooming our sweet little spaniels, my children suddenly suffer from “explosive amnesia.” However the understanding of the function and purpose of a bathtub swiftly returns whenever a new and dry roll of toilet paper or a freshly laundered bath towel is temptingly stationed in our bathroom.
10. Thou shalt RINSE the residual filth from the bathtub before exiting this room.
    I am a bath taker, or at least I was until I had children. There is nothing more soothing than candles (also notably absent from my house), a book (now replaced by my e-reader which I find a little precarious see previous note about karma for in-bath reading), and a soothing bubble bath. Although, there is something distinctly not soothing about finding UBF in my bathtub, or Unidentified Bathtub Floaties. Therefore I swiftly stopped making “Me Tea” as my sweet hubby coined the phrase. Although come to think of it....that is even less charming than the little rhyme about sprinkling and tinkling. Goodness, what have I become?

Marital Mayhem

 

I am writing this post with great personal risk to my life and marriage. If my husband knew of the delicate nature of the contents, he would likely run off with some tube-top sporting circus freak and change his name to Bubba just to maintain his anonymity. I usually talk about my life among the mayhem caused by my children, but today I am struck by the humor of the mayhem caused by the communication, or lack thereof, between the sexes.

I used to believe that the invisible wall that results in a complete semantic breakdown between my husband and myself was a unique feature to our house that realtor neglected to tell us when he was giving the tour. Can you imagine the dialogue, “And if you are in the kitchen and your spouse is in the living room, be warned that no conversation will ever end in diplomatic unity. This is due to the “Tick Off the Wife Wall. It is invisible, but scientists are working on a means of tracking the energy and locating the phenomenon.” Apparently this is a common geographical anomaly, because I have talked three different women through the process of eliminating vague directions. So, to help minimize the fallout of marital mayhem, I will provide a handy guide to interpreting wife-speak.

 

1. “I don't know, Honey. It is a little expensive.” I have found through my own experience that this somehow passes the male brain filter and translates as, “She is okay with my owning this **Fill in the blank here with ludicrous and absurd testosterone-dripping desire** as long as she doesn't have to find the money to pay for it.” What is going through the female brain before this phrase escapes her mouth is, “What the H*** would any human being want with a **Fill in the blank here with ludicrous and absurd testosterone-dripping desire**? Since it is absurdly outside our price range, I can tell him this and close the matter without seeming like a nagging meanie.”

I am currently awaiting a **Fill in the blank here with ludicrous and absurd testosterone-dripping desire** of which I did not successfully circumvent the purchase. My downfall came in not saying, “Honey, NO! I do not want **Fill in the blank here with ludicrous and absurd testosterone-dripping desire** in the same ten mile radius as me or anybody that I love, therefore when it comes, it can enjoy a cozy permanent home in the mailbox.”

 

2. “I would really like a **Fill in the blank with a modestly priced, modestly sized, logical desire**” This does not mean to buy an approximation or variation on said desire in a much larger caliber or with a much larger price tag. A television is still a television even if it doesn't swallow the entire living room and leave no place for the public to view it. A larger vehicle is still larger than your Honda even if it doesn't get a measly 6 MPG and roar like a wild beast. Despite attempts to convince the male population to the contrary by infamous television comedians of eras past who grunt at their bigger and badder mechanical devices, sometimes good enough is just...well, good enough

 

A good friend was complaining to her husband that she loved animals and would really like a modestly sized dog. In response, he purchased her a mildly gigantic dog rather than a behemoth dog that carries brandy in a keg and could carry a small family to safety after an avalanche. Her sweet canine has destroyed and dug up numerous items and always her sweet hubby says, “You said you wanted a dog.” To which I tell him for the sake of avoiding marital mayhem, “Yup, she said she wanted a dog, not a miniature horse crossbred with a tornado.”

 

3. Do what you want, Dear.” This is wife-speak for “Good heavens, don't ever do what you just said you were going to do. Search through the mental log of our previous conversations and do what I vaguely hinted that you should do.” If this phrase is uttered with a heaving sigh, DUCK. All Hell is about to break loose. This enumerated entry is more of a cry for reform to the female population. If you want a modestly sized dog, name the breed. Be specific. If you don't want to move to Siberia tell him that you are happy in your suburban paradise and would rather amputate a limb than follow him into the permafrost.

 

4. "Honey, you need to handle this.” This phrase is often muttered in exasperation with a disciplinary situation. Interpret this very carefully as “Perform a miracle in which the child learns the disciplinary lesson, never repeats the offending behavior, has a tear in his eye for the sin he has committed, and offers apologies and lollipops while planning his life as a missionary in a third world country.” This does NOT mean, “Become a whip-wielding drill sergeant who summers as an Alcatraz prison guard, withhold food and water while shouting insults about their intelligence and their genealogy, and top the whole operation with a sound thumping just so they will never forget it.” All joking aside, there has to be an honest compromise on this front. My husband and I would have a relationship of sunshine and roses if we didn't have to do all that parenting stuff which just causes conflict. Can't the children just live feral in the backyard and be raised by our dogs? The doghouse should be big enough; I requested my little toy-sized beauties by name.

There are so many that I am having a hard time listing them all. “Buy some milk and eggs at the store,” means, “Get the milk and eggs, but add some ice cream and hard liquor without spending any additional money.” “I have too much to do,” sincerely means, “Go do some dishes.” “The children are making me crazy,” means “Break out some tranquilizers and tuck in the minions.” “Leave me alone,” means “Leave me alone,” unless uttered while crying which then means, “Under no circumstances do you leave me alone, you chase me down like a bloodhound until I vent to you about every injustice that has bothered me since the moment that I was born until this exact second.” “Whatever,” secretly means, “Shutup!” “I have a headache,” translates to, “Oh My Gosh, go take a shower. I think something died in your back pocket.”

In truth, ladies. I think the issue here is us...well, maybe just me. I tend to be cryptic about my communicated desires... or undesires. I find myself all too often trapped in unwanted situations merely because I didn't communicate with absolution my expectations to the contrary. I don't buy into the whole Mars/Venus thing, because these personality conflicts are inherent in any relationship. But I am discovering that my partner doesn't have a crystal ball, or at the very least is lousy at reading it and doesn't see the raging anger that is imminent in his immediate future, merely due to his poor education in the intricately bizarre and cryptic language of Wife-speak.