Boys Stink

I'm a scientist. I have verifiably proven this to be fact. My house has become a petri dish of unholy stench. Now that the evidence has been gathered and repeated to verify my experimental findings (gee, thanks, I thought no one cared), I feel I am no longer compelled to endure the devastation.

Starting roughly a fortnight ago, Buddy decided to build a vanity sink out in the Mud Hut. I was ecstatic. So, he promptly turned off all our water. "All" being a loose term here because we really only had a toilet.

It's the country, y'all.
(We run over to the Big Red House for hygenic purposes. So, yes, there is a lot of running. A HECK of a LOT of running.)

So. The water gets turned off, so add toileting to the running. Which means that when it's cold outside at night and Squib crawls in my bed at 2 a.m. and whispers, "Mama! I can't hold it anymore!" That we are going to have to put on a heck of a lot of clothing for nightime and stumble through the darkness--which I quickly figured out doesn't work well unless you are, in fact, carrying the child--over to the Big Red House, do our thing, and then come back. He knows the way. He's not afraid of the dark at all. He goes over there in the dark all the time, but the doors do not shut themselves so I must go to shut all the doors and do the flushing. Thoroughly.

The door is, in fact, open right now, but Buddy left it open. See what I am up against here?

So. No water. No toilet. But, incoming sink. Yay!

Then Squib, in a fit of creative angst whilst sitting on my bed gets upset when the iPad crashes mid-writing exercise. It was a huge story, I tell you, and blast it all if it wasn't worth all his very life was built on. He bursts into tears, melts down completely, hops off the bed, lands on something Dr. Seuss must have placed there himself because Squib DID NOT do it, skids on the laminate flooring and totally demolishes the smaller of two tile tables on the far side of the bed. Everything flies everywhere.

He cries. Everybody cries. I almost cry because, apparently, the only way to put in a sink was to take everything I own and shift it all one space to the left after taking the refrigerator and the freezer into the other room and moving the chairs and sofa to a completely different spot. So I'm trying to clean up Squib's mess in the middle of what looks like something a tornado created. So I literally swept it all into a corner, bagged it, and we went to bed.

The smell woke me up. Oh my merciful pea-pickin' heart what a stench.

Simultaneous to this new smell we had discovered, Buddy decided it was a good time to remove the toilet and start working on tiling the bathroom floor. If you haven't ever removed a toilet that has been in use, then you have never lived. This is all captive in a building roughly twice the size of a two car garage. I started to wonder if I was going to keep my breakfast down while working to find the first smell.

That was when Buddy said something along the lines of "Oh crap." Only not.

And we discover that the wall of the Mud Hut wasn't really attached to the flooring and the flooding we'd experienced was due to the fact that you could see daylight between the two. So, he tore about two feet of sheetrock out of the bathroom. The wall behind it was covered with mold and mildew.

Enter the third smell.

Exit Scat for a few minutes. Because, really, I'd had about all I could take right then and not a single male in the family seemed to think anything was wrong back there at all. Not a bit. Except for Squib who had run out of Scotch tape. He was bothered by that.

So I opened the doors to, hopefully, get a breeze or something--anything--moving through the house and went back in to investigate the disaster near the bed and recover from Squibs side a pair of camouflage pants underneath the bed that had absorbed a cup of milk someone had so generously given Squib. He had spilled it during the app crash from hell and somehow in this rubble of personal crapola, I did not notice. Phew!

I can't possibly make this stuff up.
Scat