What they don't tell you in Motherhood Books: Plumbing

When you're pregnant, people love to give you advice and motherhood books.  Heck, they love to do that anytime they realize that you have a kid, whether they have raised one  or not.  But the things that no one tells you sometimes end up being the things you need to know.  Like how to do minor plumbing repairs on your own.

Since my husband and I both work full-time non-farming jobs, my daughter is in camps during the summer daytime hours.  Which means she comes home with all kinds of crafts and things.  Mostly these involve paper, paint, yarn, and those darn rubber band things (just like school!).  But then there are the Orbeez(R).  According to their website:

Orbeez are superabsorbent polymers—that means they are made of several smaller molecules joined together. With the addition of water they can grow to more than 100 times their volume. That’s right, place a tiny Orbeez bead in water and watch it swell! The water is absorbed into the spaces between the molecules. These polymers were invented for agricultural use back in the 1960s to irrigate crops during times of drought. Today you will find superabsorbent polymers in diapers to prevent leaks, in food packages to absorb liquid and in floral vases to hydrate cut flowers.

Of course, using them for agricultural uses must not have been profitable enough, so now they are marketing them for children to make in kits.  Colleen makes them at daycare and brings them home in cups.  I guess they stress the "water" part of these darn things, because she is obsessed with washing them; they are also slimy and attract all kinds of dirt and animal hair, which may contribute to their needing to be cleaned. 

Fast forward a week into their entry into our house.  Suddenly our bathroom sink is clogged.  My husband was the first one to discover it, and asked my daughter, as she had been washing the beads and there were some remnants of them on the bathroom floor.  She blamed the cat, insisting that the cat had somehow clogged the bathroom sink.  Right.  Later that evening I spent quite awhile pulling the things out with tweezers (for some reason our new faucet set-up does now allow you to remove the drain plug, which I think is completely ridiculous.  So, short of my husband disconnecting the pipes and removing them, which wasn't going to happen anytime soon, we were going to have a clogged drain).  Then I got out the vinegar and baking soda and let that go to work (this is an eco-friendly version of drain unclogger and works in a pinch when the clog is not horrible and you have no drain unclogger on hand).  The sink is not quite back to normal, but is much more usable. 

So keep in mind that all conversations regarding the sink/beads/clog/cat had been between my daughter and husband at this point.  I had unclogged the drain after she went to bed.  She certainly noticed the next morning when she got up that it was working, and made a comment to that effect.  I gave her a look.  And the very next words out of her mouth were, "I don't know how the orbeez got down the drain Mommy. I didn't put them there." Right.

Sadly, this is not the only time I've had to do this kind of thing.  Those tweezers live in our bathroom and are strictly for pulling things out of drains.  Colleen is in her "experimental science" and "taxidermy" phases.  This involves a lot of washing things down sinks.  I never know what dead insect she will decide has to be washed off in our sink so she can study it better. I don't mind the washing and studying of the insect so much, but we do have a utility sink in the basement for this kind of thing.