A Mother's Day Mess

 On the afternoon of Mother's Day I was standing in the kitchen when suddenly the sink began to burble.

Suddenly black water began gushing up from the drain. I stood staring at it as the sink slowly filled with murky and slightly chunky water.

This is bad, I thought.

We've had some plumbing problems before. Previously I wrote about a major toilet back-up, in Old pipes+big trees=big problems.

As I watched the nastiness gurgle up in my kitchen sink, I suddenly remembered a conversation I had with my neighbor a few days before, in which she told me how a sewer backup had caused a mess in her bathtub several months ago.

What she'd actually said was, "Turds! In my TUB!" She'd added, "And I hadn't even GONE that day! Whose WERE they?"

I know. I should have warned you. Ewwwww....

Anyways, as the gross mess threatened to overflow the bounds of the sink, I realized I'd better stop staring in horror and DO something!

I grabbed a bucket and yelled for help.

What followed was like a three-bucket fire brigade, involving me, my husband, and GG. We scooped up bucketsful of the disgusting water and fled out the back door to dump it in the yard.

In the middle of this scene the twins appeared and GG stopped scooping water and hustled them off to their room, shutting them in. They started yelling like crazy from in there.

Boo and a couple of her friends appeared from the back of the house to see what was going on, and we shooed them outside. From their bedroom, the twins continued to scream about the injustice of missing all the action.

ET never emerged from her room and missed the whole screaming-bucket-brigade drama.

We kept it up until the sink finally stopped regurgitating and settled down to a low level of nasty water at the bottom. Then I called maintenance, who fortunately arrived quickly.

They warned us not to flush the toilet, until the mess had been sorted out, as disaster might result.

Again, ew........

There followed a marathon scraping, plunging, and snaking session that took over the kitchen for the next three hours.

But there was good news! It was only backup from the garbage disposal, not the sewer. No turds were involved. (Whew!)

All in all, an interesting, albeit messy, Mother's Day.