The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Gross

Sub-Title: Why I Blog: Part 2
(WARNING: Picture of my open toilet ahead. It's not too gross. But now you've been warned.)

Today I am taking care of my friend's son, Jeremiah. While Sam and Jeremiah were playing very nicely together, Rachel was fussing and needed to go down for nap. So I brought her upstairs and took advantage of the opportunity to go to the bathroom. I decided I didn't want to listen to her cry in her crib so I let her roam the bathroom, as I've done many times before. Except this time, when I finished, I closed the lid as usual, and before I could get my foot on the lid (to hold it down while I washed my hands), Rachel opened it and dropped the bath toy she was holding into the toilet. Which I hadn't yet had a chance to flush. Ewwwwwwwww.

As I put Rachel down for her nap, I contemplated my options. Option 1: Flush the fish and hope it made its merry way down the sewer. The most tempting option by far except for the potential sewer-backing-up and Sam-notices-his-fish-toy-is-missing-and-mourns-forever implications. Option 2: Retrieve the fish and garbage it. Also tempting except for the above Sam noticing implications and, if the worst part was retrieving it, then why not save it? Option 3: Retrieve the fish, save it, avoid Sam-noticing implications and have a great story to blog about! I decided to go with option 3. I used the kitchen tongs and a plastic container to hold the fish after its great adventure. (Mostly so that it didn't drip reminders of its great adventure throughout the house.) Then I put on some gloves, used a lot of soap and hot water and washed them all thoroughly. Then I put the dishcloth in the laundry.

Then I boiled everything for half an hour to sterilize it.

And now I have a drying fish, tongs and container in the dish rack. And Sam's only annoyance is that I wouldn't let him play with the tongs before I had washed and sterilized them.

And this gets back to why I blog. Why wouldn't I want to remember a day like today? Remember how gross parenting can be. Remember the lengths you will go to for your kids. And provide all of you with a laugh and a sigh of relief that it wasn't you. At least not today.

What would you have done? Would you have kept the fish?