Lulled into Complacency

So, this afternoon we were all upstairs. I was catching up on e-mail, Newton was watching TV, and Cindy Lou and the Wizard were playing. The Wizard wanted a drink, so Newton opened the gate for him to go downstairs. He knows how to get himself a drink either in the bathroom (using his toothbrushing cup) or the kitchen (using the fridge water dispenser), so I wasn't worried. After a few minutes, though, the sounds from the bathroom seemed a little, well, WET. Newton and I both shouted downstairs for him to turn off the water, and he came upstairs shortly after, saying, "I'm all wet." Great.

It was time to feed Cindy Lou anyway, so we headed downstairs to find a LAKE in the bathroom. I handed off Cindy Lou to Newton and mopped it up with some towels. Besides the lake on the floor, water had splashed up on the walls and toilet. Apparently, coming downstairs and finding a sink full of swimming suits and water, the Wizard had decided it would be fun to use the toothbrushing cup as a ladle to scoop water onto the floor. Eeeeeeee!

So, with the bathroom floor dried and the towels hanging over the tub (and the Wizard's wet clothing removed), Cindy Lou and I headed downstairs for some food, only to discover a LAKE in the kitchen. Apparently the water on the bathroom floor had seeped under the baseboard and was coming out around the kitchen light fixture. Fortunately it was not coming out through the plaster! Besides the four-foot-diameter puddle in the middle of the kitchen floor, there was about 3 inches of water pooled in the shade on the light fixture. I popped Cindy Lou in her high chair and ran back upstairs, cursing all the way, to grab some old towels. I spread them on the kitchen floor, then ran down to the basement. Yes, there was a lake there, too, albeit a smaller one. Ugh ugh ugh.


Not my favorite thing to have happen on a lazy summer afternoon, to say the least. Hopefully I won't have scary mold growing inside my walls where I couldn't mop up the water. But I guess that's one problem with having generally-well-behaved children--you get used to not having to worry about where they are and what they're doing Every. Single. Second., so when they do decide to get, um, creative, you're blindsided. Silver lining? We cleaned the shade of the kitchen light fixture, which was quite grimy, and replaced a burnt-out bulb.

Addendum: Last night after I had calmed down enough not to want to strangle him, the Wizard and I had a big talk about the lake incident. When I told him that his bathroom lake had created a kitchen lake which had created a basement lake, he laughed and said, "That's funny." No, I said, that's bad. "Actually, Mommy, it's bad and funny." Clearly my son and I have very different understandings of what makes something funny.