Blog the First, or How a Midnight Trip to the Potty becomes a $15,000 bill to Mommy and Daddy’s Homeowners’ Insurance.

It normally doesn’t rain in my living room. We hadn’t really ever considered the possibility of adding an indoor swimming pool to the second floor of our home. Enter, stage left, my three-year old son Davis. Davis changed all of that.

Davis is a really cute kid. He’s smart and funny and charming. He takes adorable pictures when he swipes my camera. He has a Rain-Man-esque knowledge of Disney movies. And that kid is driving me over the edge as fast as he can.

This month has been especially trying. My ceiling is being retaped and repainted, my living room furniture is being dried and salvaged, my refrigerator is relocated to my garage, a fine coat of drywall dust covers everything in my home, and all my worldly possessions are in a storage unit in the next county while my floors are being repaired. Not because we had a tornado. Not because we had a tragic accident or a fire or a plague of locusts. We had … Davis. The story? Please to enjoy…

We have mercifully finished potty training. My children do not potty train early or well, so since Davis is not yet a sophomore in high school, I was patting myself on the back for a job well done. Three weeks ago, he got up in the middle of the night to go potty (YEA!). We heard him put the seat down (What lovely manners…his future wife will thank me), we heard him turn on the water (Hygiene! Yippee!) and then we heard his bedroom door close. Because self-congratulation is rarely enough for me, I told my husband, “Did you hear that? He got up, put the lid down, AND washed his hands.” Scott mumbled something that I took for “you must be the best mother of all time” but was probably “shut up and go back to sleep”. Whichever. What I had apparently not covered in my hand-washing lessons was never to put the stopper up and leave the water running. You can’t cover everything, right?

Later that night, Scott heard water. I kept telling him that he was imagining things and that there was no water dripping. He said he heard it again. I questioned his sanity, told him he was a worry-wart, and told him he really needed to lay off the caffeine at bedtime. The next morning we awoke to squishy carpets upstairs, water-logged furniture downstairs, and a ceiling that was conveniently watering my plants in the living room. Once the insurance adjuster, the electrician, and the flooring specialist had all surveyed the damage, come up with a plan for repairs, and gone, Scott turned to me. “See, I TOLD you I heard water!”

More to come!