It's official. I never know what the day is going to bring.
For example, today I did not expect to hear strange sounds coming from the bathroom while I was busy with Kateri.
I did not expect to find the bathroom a swimming pool, with my toddler standing on top of his little potty (to be "safe" from the water) gleefully squealing and holding the handle of the toilet down so that the water just kept coming. Add to this mental picture the fact that he was completely naked since we were getting dressed when he trotted off to use the potty. I'm trying to get him to dress himself these days and it takes about an hour.
I did not expect when I ran downstairs to get the mop to find that the water was already streaming through the ceiling and into the basement. He'd only been gone 3 minutes, tops! Isaac wanted to help clean up. No way! Some people use cleaning up as a punishment or "consequence" for making a mess. But since Isaac would thoroughly enjoy such a punishment I thought it better to send him to his room. Plus, I didn't want him playing in the toilet water. With Isaac sent to his room and Kateri thrown into her highchair with a few crackers I managed to clean up.
I'm still not sure what happened. When I asked Isaac what he put in the toilet he said toilet paper, but unless he put reams and reams in (which is quite possible) it wouldn't have overflowed that much. When I asked him if he put anything else in he eventually said "bar", so I thought maybe he had put a bar of soap in, but when I went to check, the hand soap was still sitting innocently by the sink.
I get so angry sometimes, but I have to remind myself that Isaac still doesn't know what he's doing most of the time, He certainly didn't mean to overflow the toilet and maybe didn't even really realize it was a bad thing until I came and flipped out. What I find hard to comprehend, though, because I'm not the same, is how much he enjoys himself in these situations. Even when people are angry at him he enjoys the drama of it. After the initial mop up, when I came to ask him what happened, he told me how he flushed the toilet, and water came pouring out, and he had to climb up on his potty to get away from it. He got more and more excited as he told me the story and couldn't help but smile, even though he could tell that I wasn't pleased.
Now that I can think about it calmly, it's really pretty good that we've gone 3 and a half years without a toilet overflow. After all, it is a classic. And last night he found the haircutting scissors and took a couple snips off his hair (only a couple, thankfully). So I guess we're hitting some real milestones this week.
Lord, give me patience. Lord, help me understand and love these crazy children of mine. And Lord, please don't let Isaac learn how to open a child safety door knob for a long, long time. AMEN.
