Words fail me ...

Today, the playgroup we used to attend held its Valentine's party. Maggie and I were both excited to go; we stopped attending regularly when she switched to a MWF preschool schedule, but we still try to see them whenever we can. Since school was out because of President's Day today, we packed up our cookies and valentines and headed to the party.

As you may remember from this previous entry and this, one minute Maggie and her friend Meghan can love each other like the best of friends ... and the next minute fight like cats and dogs. Today they were playing nicely, so I didn't think much when they disappeared upstairs after lunch. After a while, though, I noticed they'd been awfully quiet ... too quiet. I headed up the stairs to check on them and walked in on two naked girls and a flooded bathroom floor. Maggie was frantically trying to clean up the floor -- with Meghan's clothes -- and Meghan was standing on her stool, one leg hiked over the sink, drizzling warm water all over her body and whining, "It burns! When will it stop burning?" (She'd put soap all over her body and was trying to rinse it off.)

Since my first instinct was to burst into laughter -- and in my defense, I didn't yet realize the severity of the situation -- I ran downstairs to get Karen and to explain through my tears of laughter what the girls were doing. Then someone spoke words no homeowner ever wants to hear: "Hey, there's water coming out of your kitchen light."

Long story short: the bathroom flood was so bad that the water leaked through to the downstairs kitchen. Not only did we collect an entire bucket of water that drained from the light fixture, but there were multiple other wet spots in various places on the ceiling, including one particularly bad 6" spot where the paint and drywall had started bubbling severely. Bobby, still at home and recovering from his surgery, ended up coming to evaluate the situation and had to drill several holes in the worst spot to drain the water. Karen called her home handyman guy as well as her homeowners' insurance co. and we figure it will cost at least as much as their $500 deductible to fix the ceiling, along with any water damage under the bathroom tile.

Meanwhile, we're not sure we've been able to get a straight story out of the girls. The full story seems to be coming out in bits and pieces. And I'll warn you, part of it is gross. Assuming what Maggie has told me is true, the girls were in the bathroom and Meghan was pooping. Except that instead of pooping on the potty, they piled up an entire roll of toilet paper onto the floor and then she pooped on the pile. Next, she and Maggie proceeded to each touch the poop (I can't believe I'm using the phrase "touch the poop" in conjunction with my child ... I thought we'd escaped that since she never played in her diaper as a baby). Then, they put the poop in the toilet, flushed it, then tried to flush all the toilet paper.

I should add here that after talking to Karen tonight, Meghan claims to have no knowledge of the poop incident. Karen believes her and said the expression on Meghan's face wasn't one of defiance or dishonesty, but confusion, when K asked about poop. So who knows what really happened? We both plan to continue our separate interrogations tomorrow.

That's when the toilet overflowed. In an attempt to fix the problem, Maggie reached into the toilet and started pulling out gobs of wet toilet paper. Meghan went to her bedroom, pulled clean clothes out of her dresser, and used the clean clothes to mop the water off the floor. And somehow, three different types of toothpaste and half a bottle of toddler mouthwash also ended up in the toilet. Somewhere in there, too, Maggie decided Meghan should clean her bottom with foaming hand soap, hence Meghan's efforts to rinse the soap, which later had started to sting, from her skin. And I'm still not sure why Maggie was naked.

I think Meghan understands the severity of the situation better than Maggie does. Maybe it's because Meghan saw firsthand her own kitchen ceiling dripping with water and had to throw away two of her favorite musical toothbrushes, which ended up on the bathroom floor in the toilet water (this last fact seemed to upset her most). But Maggie seems oddly disaffected from the whole thing. The most we've gotten out of her was that it was wasteful to use so much toilet paper -- umm, yeah, that's really the last thing we're all concerned about.

I'm struggling to come up with an appropriate punishment -- something that helps her make the connection between her actions today and their effects, not only on Karen's house but on both of our wallets (we're splitting the $500 deductible) and is sufficiently harsh to make an impression on her. So far today, she was allowed no TV or movies, no stories before bedtime, and she was sent to bath/bed right after dinner. We're toying with continuing the no TV/movies all week, not allowing playdates through the end of the month, requiring her to do chores to "earn" money toward our portion of the payment, and/or certainly not allowing she and Meghan to play together without supervision. She will also be writing a note of apology to the Wilsons -- I'll help her with the words and the spelling and I don't care if it takes up 19 pages of barely legible lettering, she's going to do this part. When she offered Karen a verbal apology today, it seemed totally insincere, and she only cried when we left to go home. She just doesn't get it. If you have any other suggestions for punishment, I'd love to hear them. Right now, I'm still at a loss for words. I'm sure some day I'll look back on all this and laugh.

But not any time soon ...