NO NO! YES YES!

Little Benjamin like most other two year olds just loves to be read to. It isn’t uncommon for Ben, when things are winding down for the evening to go to the bookshelf in his room, pick a book out and ask us to read it to him. This is a great way to end the day and it is fun to look at the pictures together and watch him soak up ideas and information. Sometimes though you have to watch out for exactly what is being soaked up.

That brings me to one of Ben’s and my personal favorites in his library, a book called “No No Yes Yes” by Leslie Patricelli. It is a very simple board book with fun simple illustrations showing things that a toddler Ben’s age should be doing and should not be doing. For example No No! to pulling the cat’s tail, Yes Yes! to petting the cat kindly.

On one page we learn of the things a toddler should be doing in the most famous of toddler playgrounds, the toilet. As we see, there are certain things that should be done with a toilet…

… and certain things that should not.

Unfortunately, I think that when we last read this book to Ben he mixed up column “A” with column “B”. He is a repeat offender in this department.

A few weeks ago, the toilet in our kids’ bathroom upstairs suddenly stopped flushing. This is NEVER EVER EVER a good sign. This wasn’t just a clogged toilet; this was an immovably clogged toilet. It was like a cork pushed into the top of a wine bottle and then super-glued in place. We lined the children up for interrogation where Benjamin freely admitted that the reason that the toilet wouldn’t flush is that his duck was in there, just like in his book…

NO NO!

We placed a moratorium on the use of that toilet until it could be fixed. Unfortunately though the moratorium didn’t take. Apparently at some point, some child had come in in the middle of the night at some point and had forgotten that new rule. How can I say this delicately… they dropped a major deuce right into the non-flusher and then let it sit not daring to tell us that it was there until weeks later.

Fast forward to earlier this week. We had Valerie’s cousin Angelina Wilde coming over to stay with us for a day or two while she was in town to take her nursing exams. Valerie insisted that this bathroom be functional again before we had company over. I tried to tell Valerie that cousins don’t count as company but that argument couldn’t gain any traction. It seems there is some unwritten law that when any visitor is coming over to the house, all plumbing must be operating in peak form. It was time to fix the toilet.

Toilet work is never fun and this time it was even worse because of the “present” that had been left behind. Valerie and I donned our bio-hazard suits and I’ll spare you the details of our ordeal at that point. It is enough to say that I may not eat with my bare hands for a several months.

After much work and contortion, this toilet still wasn’t flowing in the least. Next came one of me least favorite things to do. I removed the toilet from the floor. This is always a nasty job since you have to mess with that icky hole in the floor and there is that NASTY wax ring that you need to scrape off and replace every time.

It seems that Mr. Ducky was also well-hidden when approached from the exit of the toilet. I shoved all kinds of stuff up there to see if I could jar him loose but it was of no use.

I decided to take the whole toilet out onto our front porch hoping the neighbors were in bed and there wrestled with it further. I tried shoving a running hose up the backside of the commode hoping that a brisk enema might do the trick. Still nothing.

I hope I remember this night when I’m tempted to drink out of that hose while doing yard work next summer.

The kids really wanted to watch all the fun and excitement but Valerie gave the sage advice “I’d stay away from dad right now if I were you”. That is the best idea I had heard all day. Since Ben was already convicted in this crime and I was getting very willing to punish anyone else in my vicinity for the more serious deuce-dropping offense.

Finally my frustration got to the tipping point where the cost of a new toilet was less than the value of the adventure I was having. The last and my favorite tool in the arsenal was a good old fashioned claw hammer. Goodbye fair toilet…

…and hello Mr. Poo-duck.

That felt much better. I ended up smashing the whole thing into tiny little chunks that could fit into our garbage can and I felt my spirit returning with each blow.

Then it was off to Lowes where I quickly found and purchased a new “Toilet to Go” brand by Crane Plumbing complete toilet kit complete with seat and everything for the kids’ bathroom. It might as well have been called “El-Cheapo “ since I made this selection simply by walking down the aisle until I saw the cheapest possible commode I could buy. I think the lid and seat were made by Tupperware.

By skimping on the toilet, I figured that It would be easier for me to decide to replace it when Zac gets old enough to start flushing his toys. This is now the third toilet that we have used in that bathroom since we have been in our house.

Toilet #1: 1999 – 2001
Toilet #2: 2001 – 2008
Toilet #3: 2008 - ?

Thankfully for the health and safety of our children, the install of “Toilet to Go” went very smoothly and life and it’s by-products are flowing freely once more.