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31 Days Not According to Plan

Talk about a day not going according to plan…Tuesday was it.

We got a phone call at 5:00 a.m. from a friend whose wife had gone into labor. They needed someone to watch their daughter and we had volunteered. We were excited to be what my husband had termed the “rapid response team.” Within ten minutes, we were ready and out the door.

A couple hours later, I had just started to doze again when I heard their daughter ask Ben, “Did the baby go knock knock?” Yep, the baby was a knockin’ and the house was a rockin’.

After just two hours at the hospital, our friends called to tell their little girl she had a baby sister. “We figured it out!” she exclaimed.

She was a joy to be with and a wonderful start to the day. I was exhausted from the 5:00 am wake up call though, so when we were relieved by her grandmother and returned home later that morning, I laid down to take a nap.

Within minutes of laying down, I heard water gushing and Ben crying out, “I need some help in here!” I ran to the bathroom where a geyser of water spewed unstoppably from where the sink handle should have been. Being an old sink, there was no knob under the basin to turn off the water.

“You’ve got to find the cut off!” I shouted, taking over Ben’s attempts to slow the jet of water with my hands.

As water flooded from the bathroom onto the hardwood hallway floor, I grabbed every towel we have to create a dam. I saw a crock along the way and grabbed it too, catching as much of the spouting water as possible and emptying it into the toilet.

After what seemed like ten minutes (and quite possibly may have been with the maze of knobs in the basement), my husband found the cut-off point and the geyser finally stopped. I went to the top of the basement stairs to tell him, at which point I heard buckets of water draining from our apartment floor into the basement.

We spent the next couple hours mopping up the mess, drying everything from floor to ceiling. I spent another hour cleaning a fan coated in paint residue so we could use it to dry out the floor without making another mess. And when Ben returned from work that evening, we spent more time putting the house back together.

As I tackled one task after another, I thought of the blog post I’d started writing about other days in the past year that hadn’t gone according to plan. And I decided it was high time to finish that post.

Continues on May 18th post, Unexpected Attack.