Shit Happens.

There are times when nothing helps but writing it down...with a glass of wine at my side. This is one of those times.

It had been a nice day. The 12 year old and I went to the second hand shop and we scored her 4 pairs of jeans. For a $40! We watched To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. Love her clothes. A good day, all in all. Until an hour ago. Then all hell broke lose. All fuckin' hell.

It started when my 8 year reported that he thought we may have had a flood in the basement. "May have had"??? I asked as I high-tailed it to the basement door. Sure enough, raw sewage had backed up into the boiler room sometime in the last 48 hours. No standing water, just dried t.p. and turds strewn across the basement floor. Holy shit...literaly. We have had this problem before but not in the last 10 years. The problem is that I own a house that was built in 1927 and the sewer line to the street was laid in 1927. Clay. And roots. Roots from the maple tree next to my driveway which have cracked and invaded the pipe. Time for the plumber's root cutter but not on a weekend when they charge $50 a minute. Until then we monitor each flush. No one is allowed to take a big poop. No showers or baths. And we can't flush and run the dish washer at the some time. Forget laundry.

Then the other shoe dropped. It all started several days ago when I sent my son into the now infamous boiler room to get a wine glass for my sister who was coming to dinner. He found the wine glass AND a large bag of La Leche League balloons. He pocketed several balloons and brought me the wine glass. I clearly told him that he and his younger sister could play with the balloons they had but under no circumstances was he allowed to get any more. Got that? Good.

Of course, if I had been paying better attention I would have noticed the fact that I was forever picking up the dead bodies of popped balloons from the floor. More then the few that were originally retrieved from the basement. But NO...I was clueless.

Cut to 45 minutes ago when the screams of my 14 year old interrupted my cruising the on-line dating sites for hot men. Now, there are certain types of screams that get me moving faster then others. This one was a "move at a moderate rate of speed" scream. Turns out the 8 and 4 year olds had been filling balloons with water and squirreling them away in his room. You know the rest. A balloon as big as my head popped in his room and flooded everything in the vicinity. I started in with my labor breathing (boy, I got my money's worth from that class!) and directed the clean up. Thank God for that pile of beach towels in the linen closet.

So, shit happens. At the moment Michele Shocked is singing to me and my 4 year old has finally stopped crying and clinging to me. (I'm sure you have all written posts with your sobbing 4 year old in your laps? No? The key is to have her facing you with the head on your shoulder so that you can reach the keyboard.) My 12 year old is in the tub, where she has been since before the shit discovery with directions to let the water out slowly! The 14 year old is cooking lentil soup. And my boy. Why, he is confined to his room until he is 18 years old or until I get a good enough bid for him on e-bay...whichever happens first. Maybe I'll make enough on him that I can pay the plumber. And take that vacation to the South of France. You think....