Our toilet broke. In the tank, for those of you familiar with the inner workings of toilets, the connector from the level arm to the flapper snapped. The flapper was made of rubber and the connector was made of the same rubber. In fact, it was all one piece and when the thin connector string snapped off the flapper, there was nothing to even attempt to hook it to again.
So the toilet in our master bedroom was out of commission. This isn’t the end of the world for anyone in the house – we have four toilets for three people and one of us isn’t even toilet trained. It seems like we should easily be able to find an available bathroom when the need arises.
The issue comes is that it’s the toilet in the master bathroom which also happens to be attached to the master bedroom, which just so happens to be where we spend our nights and mornings. And trust me, at 5:30am just after the alarm has gone off is not the best time to be remembering that the toilet we’ve used almost every day for the past four years shouldn’t be used.
I only had to reach into the tank and pull the flapper up by hand once.
After one day of forgetting about it, I stopped by the hardware store last night and found a new flapper, one with a metal chain and guaranteed to withstand harsh water and be adjustable to control how fast the toilet flushes. For those of you who haven’t shopped for toilets recently, I honestly suggest going to a store and looking at the toilet repair section. It’s amazing how many products and gadgets that will reduce water use and make the tank quieter and improve the clockwise flow to correspond with the hemisphere’s Coriolis effect, etc.
Ok, I made the last one up, but still. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about flushing mechanisms in a quick 5 minutes.
I got home, took Brooklynn up to the bathroom with me, set her on the floor out in the main part of the room, and got to work. Brooklynn likes to hang out in different places in the house, and as long as she can see you and you talk to her a little bit, she’s a good little helper.
I turned off the water, drained the tank, and changed out the flapper. Added in the new one, hooked up the new metal chain version that won’t break like the old one, and turned the water back on. I still had to adjust the chain length to fine tune the flushing action, and while I was doing this, Brooklynn came sliding into the small room with the toilet to join me.
She starting to flip on her stomach much more often, and when she gets there, she moves. Backwards.
She still doesn’t seem to know where she’s going or head toward anything in particular. More often than not, she moves directly away from whatever she really wants to reach for, but as long as she isn’t against something that doesn’t move she’s usually ok with it.
Yesterday, I looked down at her as she slid into the room, smiled, and waved.
She looked up at me with a look that seemed to say “What are you doing in here? And how did I get here with you anyway? And have I mentioned how excited I am to see you?!”
It seems like she’s developing so fast. Her expressions and mannerisms are exploding and we can see more and more of her personality and intelligence coming out every day.
And then she leaned over and tried to chew on the bottom of the toilet.
This is our daughter. We hope that intelligence keeps kicking in, because we’re not quite there yet.
