Today, as I was cleaning up after lunch, St. Nick said, "Wow, Mom, what stinks?" and a second later, "I smelled something really stinky but now I smell oranges." And a second later, "MOM! MOM! MOM! THERE'S A FLOOD A FLOOD A FLOOD!"
That caught my attention. I set aside Mud Pie's plate of goo (once a jelly sandwich and orange slices), which I'd been ready to stuff down the disposal, and peered around the refrigerator.
Water, seeping out from under it. My first thought was that the leak in the refrigerator had worsened, but the leak is just a trickle from a frozen line - the fix is simply to unplug the thing for a few days, but when on earth can a family of five unplug the refrigerator and leave the door hanging open for days at a time?
Anyway, the water was orange. And chunky. And there was a lot of it. An awful lot.
"Get diapers! Get diapers!" I hollered to Nick and Fish. Since, as we all know, cloth diapers are about the most absorbent thing on the planet.
I sopped it up, pulled the refrigerator out, checked the drip pan inside, emptied it though it wasn't full, washed my hands, rinsed Mud Pie's gooey plate.
"Mom! There's MORE WATER!"
Hmmmm. Water running + water running across the floor = leak. (Guess who's teaching my kids logic! Yeah, not me.)
I opened up the cabinet beneath the sink, pulled out the trash can. An orange had exploded under the sink, and was still exploding, gushing out of the pipe that connected the disposal to the rest of the pipes down there. That's when I turned the faucet off. Gushing slowed to a trickle.
I then called Dr. D, cleaned up from lunch (using the bathroom sink), went to the basement with a bucket of orange-chunk diapers, only to see another lake down there. Now why hadn't I put the lid on the train box? Why had I set it directly under the spot where the kitchen drain pushes through from upstairs? We now have a box full of orange-scented Brio train track.
That was plenty enough catastrophe for me. I went upstairs to put Mud Pie down for a nap only to smell an odd burning something. Water from downstairs and the electrical system? No, the box fan we use for white noise during naps wasn't working. The motor had burned out.
I'm glad it just quit working instead of causing a fire! And I'm glad I'd been running orange peels through the disposal and not the usual mix of bits of this and that with a few unsightly things I discovered in the back of the refrigerator tossed in for good measure. You'd think, given the fact that I've been using cloth diapers for six years, that I have a strong stomach. But I really, really, really don't.
Dr. D just walked in the door, new box fan in hand. We are so going out for dinner tonight.
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