House Guests

As if getting ready to feed 22 crazy extended family members Thanksgiving dinner isn’t enough to keep me busy, we’ve got house guests, ya’ll. 

Four of ‘em. 

They’ve been here since last Thursday. Sleeping here. Eating here. Pooping here. They are staying for 10 days. What is that saying about house guests and fish? 

But wait, it gets worse. Two of them are sick and spreading their germs all over my house. With each sniffle, each blow, each hack, I hold my breath and pray that I don’t catch it. I can’t afford to get sick this week… not with all this cooking, and cleaning, and hostess-ing to do.  

That’s not all though, one of our house guests is a “terrible-two” year old only-child with “sharing issues.” Turns out Bucket Head is a biter! Who knew? It is kinda funny, actually. He is NOT going to let his big cousin take his toys right out of his pudgy little baby hands, dammit! And his poor cousin is having a devil of a time learning this. So, needless to say, it is very difficult to precook casseroles and hide piles of neglected paperwork and manage my regular load of daily crises when I am being summoned every few minutes to the sound of shrieking bitten and biting toddlers. It is like trying to separate mating mountain lions, and quite frankly, I’d rather not. 

So there’s that. But there is also all the extra work that goes along with house guests. Sure, sure, there are extra sheets and towels to wash, that’s a given. The daily cooking load increases. Yes. But I’m talking about all the extra social responsibilities. A home should be a retreat – a place to go when you want to get away from the world and just relax… a quite impossible feat when you’re fielding questions night and day such as: “Where does this go?” “Do you have any decaffeinated tea bags?” “How does your remote control work?” “Anything special I need to know about your washing machine?” And my least favorite: “Where do you keep your toilet plunger?” 

In the Name of All That Is Holy, with everything else on my plate right now, please do not also ask me to deal with other people’s shit this week. I have enough of my own family’s shit to deal with on a daily basis… anything else is above and beyond my job description and skill set. 

You know, you take for granted the little quirks of your home when you don’t have guests. You learn the tricks for how to open the back door that sticks, or how to work the key in the tricky lock. You learn, and you compensate, and you work with your home’s special needs. But when you have guests, you need to teach them all these little idiosyncrasies so they can survive in your natural habitat. This requires time and patience. Two things I really can’t spare right now. 

But like anything else, if you invest the time and energy upfront, your payback will be sweet. If you don’t, God help you. The mess that follows is always so much worse than the time it would have taken to just do it right in the first place. 

One of the many quirks of my suburban jail tract home is that the plumbing in general sucks and the builder-grade toilets are completely inadequate. At one point when my husband was out of town and my four year old son clogged one of the toilets so badly that I had to purchase and utilize an actual auger to fix it, we knew that we would need to upgrade our toilets sooner than later. But like most things in which I am a participant, it was done totally half-assed (pardon the pun), and we only got around to replacing one: the powder room toilet on the main level. The toilet we thought would get the most action when we had guests.

The five occupants of my home know that the powder room toilet is THE ONE to use and we respect it. But we failed to teach this to one of our relatives last year and he had a particularly unfortunate 2nd floor toilet clog that flooded the kids’ bathroom and leaked through the ceiling into our family room. Not pleasant. 

Apparently, we’re slow learners and forgot to teach our latest batch of guests the house rule about which toilet to use for serious bidness. So, as luck would have it, last Sunday after breakfast, I heard one of our guests upstairs asking for the plunger. Then I noticed that the other upstairs commode was also clogged. Double simultaneous toilet clogs. Clearly these people need more fiber. I was beside myself. If our plumbing can’t handle 4 house guests… what is Thanksgiving day going to be like with 22? 

Panic. I am in a full-frontal-panic. We need to DROP EVERYTHING and get a new toilet for upstairs before Thursday.

More evidence: two years ago one of my sisters-in-law came out of the powder room after her pumpkin pie had hit bottom, unabashedly demanding some Oust or a fragrant candle. Last year I was prepared for her… I had a plethora of odor masking items prominently displayed in the powder room. But this particular sister-in-law must have laid some especially malodorous pipe, because even with the Oust and the candle and the matches and the electric scented oil diffuser, she left the fan on and closed the door behind her after she created her masterpiece. For the next two hours, everyone thought the powder room (the ONE bathroom with the good toilet) was occupied and trudged up the stairs, past all the laundry and kid clutter I had stashed, to unknowingly clog the two old builder-grade toilets up there.  Lord have mercy… I am getting hives just thinking about crazy old Uncle Charlie thumbing through my stash of Pottery Barn catalogs in the master-suite.

OK, I’m revved up now. I have an action plan:

1.) Buy at least one new toilet before Thursday.

2.) Add extra fiber to the Thanksgiving menu.

3.) Teach sister-in-law the art of the courtesy flush.

What? You don’t know it either? Oh, let me help you out, honey. This strategy is a winner for odor-management (thanks MB!). But don’t do it on an easily clogging toilet or you are in for an unpleasant surprise. From www.urbandictionary.com: 

Courtesy Flush: a term popular in jail. A courteous thing to do when you have a cellmate and are in the small confines of a jail cell. A method you perform when in the jail cell to eliminate the smell of your bowel movement. Usually executed at the point of release from the anus and before it hits the water. The suction of downforce of the flush eliminates the gases as well as the odor of the loaf. ”Yo, do a courtesy flush bro, that shit smells dude.”

Stay tuned. I have a feeling the toilet shopping/installation the day before Thanksgiving is going to be blog-worthy.