theITbaby

the IT city, the I.T. Baby

misc

When it rains it snows

Messy story involving bodily functions – you’ve been warned.

6:30am I get up to get the kids ready for school. This is a fairly normal routine. I notice the light is on downstairs indicating that one of the kids got up a bit earlier and is probably roaming around. Also sometimes normal.

I walked back to greet the kiddos and get them moving as it’s never both kids up. I walked into the youngest’s room and said “good morning” and noticed I didn’t see her in her bed. Heard crying start from the corner of the room about a second later that she’d had an accident and I asked “in your bed” and got back “no, right now” and noticed there was an ever-expanding puddle on the wood floor edging up against the carpet.

She’d been half asleep trying to wake up and grab her clothes and my saying good morning had literally scared the piss out of her. This was the first time I’d ever scared a half sleeping child to pee. I also didn’t know she was in the corner, nor half asleep, so not a whole lot I could have prepped for. Not a big thing I just got her out of the puddle and started mopping it up. We had a short little talk about where the term “scared s***less” and “turned yellow” came from and how it’s a natural instinct when scared to make a smell.

It was a very short talk because while this was happening my oldest started screaming from the bathroom that the toilet was overflowing. The kid had of course locked the door and was freaking out and it took a good 10+ seconds of water flowing over before I could get in. This took out the bathroom and the hallway and basically there were three rooms with wet floors on the first floor, and I discovered later a pee-basement area.

I’m not sure what was in the toilet. It plunged pretty easily and was out of sight so all I had to do was a pretty easy plunge job in a very diluted pee bowl. Then came the never-ending mopping.

Kim had decided to get a spin mop. These are great for anything except cleaning up large amounts of water and urine. Don’t get me wrong, great daily cleaning mop but absolutely not designed for this. This had happened about two days prior and the mop that could have handled this was nowhere to be seen and disassembled anyway.

So I mopped about six times as much as I should have had to, got the urine mostly mopped up, and hit everything carpet with a carpet cleaner because little urine-soaked feet had left a trail of pee to the bathroom. Threw in a load of laundry as well (pee soaked jammies,) and yeah.

It’s 9am, I’m sitting down to write this and waiting for the floor to dry once again as I’m hitting it with the spin mop again with nothing but water to rinse away what I fear is a pee-film. I’ve hit it with Pine-Sol, but I suspect that with how much there was it’s now pine-sol and urine… I mean, I expect no living germs, but the idea of cleaner and urine residue … meh…

Two hours of cleaning from six minutes of kids.

I’m teaching the kids how to shut the water off when everything dries and how to spot when the toilet is not in a state to flush. But that’ll be later.

Spin mop did a real mop’s job. Not particularly pleased with it though. Everyday cleaning, not dual pee-tastrophy levels but I did manage to get things cleaned up with it.

Paul King

Paul King lives in Nashville Tennessee with his wife, two daughters and cats. He writes for Pocketables, theITBaby, and is an IT consultant along with doing tech support for a film production company.