Three Little Words

"So GET THIS."

Those were the first words I heard when I walked back in the house from the grocery store on Tuesday afternoon.  Knowing that those words never precede a calm story of how wonderfully the boys behaved, picked up and quietly read a book together on the sofa, I was immediately on edge.

We'd already had a tough day, and being something of an expert on rough and tough days, I felt fully qualified to rank it at that level.  But I wasn't sure exactly which piece of my day had put me over that edge. 

Was it the moment during breakfast when Cael unceremoniously dropped his pants to show me just exactly where the roaming Cheerio had sat up camp?  Was it the loud crash I heard while cleaning the kitchen that Cael explained away with "don't worry, Mom, that was just Graham's head on the wall!"?  Maybe it was when Cael peed in the upstairs bathroom only to discover that the chain had come loose or perhaps the one, two, three times that he continued to pee in there before remembering that it wasn't functional.  Who knows? 

So you can understand my hesitation when I heard Joel proclaim those three words, but I had no idea just how awful his story would be.

You see, we've had trouble lately with Graham spending excessive time in the bathroom.  Not because he's consumed one too many cheese snacks, but because his favorite pastime involves splashing in the sink and repeatedly washing his hands at near obsessive-compulsive levels. 

But that day, as Joel and Cael heard Graham splashing away, filling up his sippy cup in an effort to quench his thirst, a quick glance to the bathroom indicated that he was not at the sink at all, but in the toilet.  Drinking gulps of cool water that he'd retrieved from the bowl.

I shrieked and shuddered at the thought of my son drinking water from the toilet like a dog.  But just as the initial shock passed, I realized that the problem was much worse.  That bathroom was the same one where the chain had come loose earlier that morning.  The same one where Cael had been peeing, without flushing, all day long.

That's right... in the ten minutes I spent up the street getting two gallons of milk and a loaf of bread, my two year-old managed to drink his brother's pee. 

Would he get sick?  I knew that urine was sterile, but the toilet certainly wasn't.  I was incredibly grateful that I'd thought to clean the toilet only two days before, but I knew that, being the main bathroom in the house, it got frequent use from several people and the water was not safe for human consumption.

But Graham teetered off to the basement to continue his assault on our home and his digestive tract.  And even though he seems to have suffered no ill effects from his strange brew, I don't think I'll forget those three little words anytime soon.