Down the Drain

FACT:  The bathtub drain was not designed to funnel away an entire tub full of water and toilet paper.

“How can you be so sure,” you might ask.  Well, just sit right back and I’ll explain how I have firsthand knowledge of this scenario.

On Thursday night, I spent a little extra time playing with the boys before sending them to bed.  It has been an extremely stressful week, what with all the things going on at work, and I’m afraid the boys have been feeling a bit of fallout from that stress.  Griffin made up some crazy monster game where I chase them and try to tickle them, and they shoot me with various plastic toy missiles.  It’s a hoot!  I get to lie in the floor and rest a lot while pretending to be dead.

Anyway, I made the nightly announcement that it was time for a bath and was met with the normal chorus of ‘awww, man’.  Then Griffin quickly added, “Can we play with the bath paints?”  I thought for a moment and decided that it was something special that would make bath time fun, and they had been a little short on fun this week, so I said “Sure.”

I dumped some red, yellow, and green bath paint on the soap shelf in the tub, and Griffin immediately mixed them into a color I like to call ‘puke’.  While I went to get Gage ready, he spread the entire puke tinted amalgamation over three walls of the tub.  When I got back with little brother, I poured some more paint out and left the room to take care of some other important things (like trying to beat Lorra Taylor’s score on Bejeweled Blitz).

After a while, I heard Griffin tell his little brother, “Let’s clean this up.”  It made my heart swell with pride!  My son was displaying a level of responsibility that seems to be devoid in children twice or even three times his age.  I kept playing.

My first clue that something had gone south was when I heard Griffin say, “Gage, Daddy’s not going to be very happy with us…Daddy’s not going to be very happy with me, at all.”  I foolishly thought, “How bad could it be, they probably splashed some water out of the tub.” 

I left my post at the computer and headed in to finish up the bath.  When I came through the door, I saw that the floor was a little wet, so I told the boys that they needed to keep the water inside the tub, and I sat down to help them finish cleaning up.  I was a bit surprised to see something long, white, and fibrous plastered to Gage’s leg when he stood up.  “What is this,” I asked, pointing to the mass.

I got no immediate answer, but as I looked closer, I noticed that the stuff was floating everywhere in the tub.  “We got some toilet paper to clean the paint off,” my eldest finally explained.

“Oh…well that’s…umm…that’s not really the best way to wipe it off,” I stuttered.  I threw the cleaning into high gear and pulled the boys out of the tub.  Crossing my fingers, I opened the drain and listened as the water emptied out.  It only took a few seconds before the pipe choked and the water completely quit moving.

Once the kids were in bed, I spent another 20 minutes bailing water out of the tub and getting it ready for a shot of clog remover.  In all that time, I never saw a hint of movement around the drain, and that, my dear people, is how I know bathtubs and toilet paper don’t mix.