On Thursday, shortly after two changes of Minor’s bed linens, stuffed animals, and pajamas had gone through the wash (he threw up twice, but kindly waited until we had finished changing everything to let loose the second time), I walked into my bedroom and noticed that the bottom half of MY bed was wet. Soaked through, in fact. I put on my detective hat:

    • 1. Minor had only been home for a few hours at that point. He was no longer sick and it was unlikely he had been unsupervised on our bed.
      2. Dog was the more likely culprit, but he had been at day care since the bed was made. Surely our cleaning person wouldn’t have made the bed with wet linens?
      3. The ceiling was also perfectly dry, so there was no possibility of a leak from that direction.

    • Stymied, I summoned Husband, who quickly discovered the source of the problem: the toilet on the third floor had overflowed AND had been running all day, flooding the bathroom to the point where it breached the lip of the bathroom door, soaked the carpet in the next room, and thereby penetrated the ceiling. This was the toilet in the bathroom next to the office where we had been working all day, oblivious to our own mini-Johnstown.

    “But how did the water get through to the bedroom without getting the ceiling wet?” I called up to Husband. He flushed the toilet and demonstrated the process: The water actually flowed out through the ceiling fan (which, mercifully, was not on). Bodily fluids had been dripping through the ceiling fan into my bedroom all day undetected. It was the Amityville Freaking Horror right here in Port City.

    (What? You didn’t spend your childhood reading completely true accounts of paranormal phenomena? Well, click on that link, then.)

    In an unrelated but oddly synchronous event, Aitch turned four last week and we decided it was high time to give up the nightly Pull-Ups. He has been toilet-trained for over a year, and for most of that time he has also been mostly dry at night. But a few months ago he started backsliding. First he started waking up wet. Then he progressed to waking up soaked. In the last few weeks, he’s been rising at 3:00 a.m. like clockwork, getting a clean Pull-Up and pajamas, and then bringing them into our room so he can be changed. It’s time to stop.

    So at bedtime we went through the ceremony of throwing away the Pull-Ups, and I explained the whole going-to-the-bathroom-in-the-middle-of-the-night thing. I couldn’t sleep at all that night; I woke up every half-hour or so worrying, was he about to have an accident and wake me up? If he came to wake me up, would he be able to find us in the guest room, where we were staying until our bedroom dried out? What if he wet the bed and had to sleep with us and then wet OUR bed? WHAT IF WE RAN OUT OF DRY BEDS IN ONE SINGLE NIGHT?

    Four nights later, he’s wet the bed twice and remained dry twice, after waking us up to take him to the bathroom. As far as I’m concerned his personal stats don’t really matter, because either way I’m waking up every half-hour to worry, getting up in the wee hours to either change him or escort him to the potty, and then lying awake for hours afterward in the guest bedroom with Aitch kicking me.

    Last night I had a brainwave. If I’m up anyway, why not work through the night and then spend the day relaxing, when the kids are gone and I can really do it right? And I was fearsomely productive between 1:30 and 6:30. Not only did I accomplish most of my work tasks for the day, but I also made hotel and limo reservations, wrote eight thank-you notes, did the grocery shopping on-line, and — oh, yeah — ordered more vinyl-backed mattress covers. It seemed like a great idea until I crashed hard at 6:30.

    I recently finished a pretty good mystery book, Case Histories, in which one of the main characters, a new mother, decides that since she can’t get anything done during the day, she’ll try to wake up earlier than her baby. She begins setting her alarm clock 5 minutes earlier each night. When we last see her, she’s rising at 3 in the morning to clean and bake pies. I don’t think I’ll be spoiling anything for you to say that her husband, through no fault of his own, ends up with an axe in his skull.

    Better get some sleep.