On today's installment of "Unglamorous and Indispensable", I'd like to introduce you to my new best friend: the toilet auger. Totally the kind of quality home-decorating advice you were looking for, right? But trust me, get out your $19.98 and go buy one RIGHT now (assuming you're a noob like me and don't already own one). This charming specimen from Home Despot is now a proud member of our household and THANK GOODNESS. Unlike your standard plumbing snake, this sucker's designed specifically to deal with that obnoxious bend in toilets where a snake usually can't get around. To use: pull the coil straight up so the bent rubber piece can fit in the toilet drain. Get that bloody thing right in there. Once it's in and somewhat "around the bend", you can start feeding the spring bit into the plumbing. Hit a snag? Spin the lever at the top nice and slow. Keep going until the clog releases. Et voila! Saved yourself a pile of money and frustration and you didn't have to scratch up your toilet with a snake that probably wouldn't have worked.
So WHY am I now on such friendly terms with the miraculous if unglamorous toilet auger? Because my daughter, my lovely, pigtailed, charming little two year old, is Stewie Griffin incarnate.
Image found at: retinaimg.com
Elzinga the Youngest has the potential to be the most loving, adorable, and positively hysterical child on Earth. She is affectionate and funny. I love her. And a good thing too, because her number one hobby is CHAOS. About a week ago I was on the phone to a girlfriend and made the number one rookie move of parents with toddlers/kids: I let down my guard and enjoyed the "silence". Silence with toddlers is not "peace". Silence with toddlers is nothing more than a warning of bad things to come. But like many parents before me (including myself! I should have learned this lesson with #1!) I relished the five minutes to drain my coffee cup and gossip undisturbed. MISTAKE. I went on the hunt and found her "cleaning up" the bathroom. The toilet lid was closed but there was a suspicious amount of water all over the floor and a soggy toilet paper roll next to the toilet. I don't know WHAT she flushed down there, but I learned she certainly flushed SOMETHING. A snake wouldn't do the trick and so I sucked it up and called the baby bro (plumber) who put me on to the toilet auger. He was willing to lend me one from his van but we both agreed that with Stewie prowling the house, owning one for the kingly sum of $20 was probably a solid investment. And it worked like MAGIC.
Fast forward a week until today. Both my children are ill, but Stewie is recovering, which means she's bitchy as hell but has more energy than she's had in several days, which in her world means using up all that energy RIGHT NOW. So she covered her forehead in pen. She ripped the straws off a dozen juiceboxes. She shredded several comic books. She harassed her sister. She managed to disable the touch mouse on my laptop. She turned on the Tassimo without a cup in it. These are the things I remember happening before 11 am... most of it my mind has blocked out in the interest of my mental health. Now it's not like she's being left to her own devices; I'm generally less than ten feet away at any given time, but she has the ninja like speed and silence that only toddlers seem capable of. She's got her forehead coloured blue WELL before ANYONE notices she's even got a pen! And she knows it. She knows that if I HEAR something I'll actually assume it's the eldest. Which is just how she got me.
The eldest stumbled down the stairs, groggy and ill, stopping off at the bathroom on her way down. So I didn't bat an eye when I heard the toilet flush. And I didn't really think about it when I heard it go again. Flush three had me on my guard, thinking that maybe the eldest was more ill than she had let on. Flush four had me bounding UPSTAIRS. Because what flush four told me was that it was Stewie, revelling in her flushing power. The bathroom floor was completely flooded. The ONE toy that is kept in the upstairs bath is a Little People boat with about twenty plastic blocks in it. The bottom of the boat and 19 blocks were in the toilet. She was using the top of the boat to throw toilet water at the walls. Block #20 was already a goner.
After I recovered from my mental breakdown and cleaned everything up, I brought out the toilet auger and made short work of the blockage.
So, yeah, buy a toilet auger. And don't ever fall for the idea that you get "silence" with a two year old Stewie living in your house.
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