We Survived The Egyptian Cotton Towel Explosion.. I Think

One of these days, y'all are going to start asking me if I make these stories up. People, I can't lie that well. It's true. And I have a brand new one for you.

Last week, the week that brought me to tears on more than one occasion, the week during which I was never once bored, the week that I am lucky to have survived? Yeah. That week. Well. Part of the fun and games of last week was bouts of stomach flu from various monsters. In fact, that was going on while I was on the phone "in court" (in reality I was hiding in the master bathroom shower stall with the sliding doors closed and the phone on mute unless I was asked a direct question. This is so the twinnies couldn't find me ~ #3 was home~, and so the court wouldn't hear my monsterlettes screaming "Mumma! Pweeeez come home!" and report me.).

Ahem. Yes. Sick monsters. Right. And with sick monsters comes the spewing of various disgusting body fluids that no one needs to hear about in detail. Right? Right. And with the spewing comes the inevitable cleaning of the spewing. Now, I'm a bit anal when it comes to cleaning up sick spew, and I use bleach. #3 was elected to clean up his own spew, and he did. And he used bleach and everything. But he left the closed gallon jug of bleach on his bathroom counter after he finished swabbing the deck. Now, you know and I know that if anything catastrophic can happen in the Monster House, it will. And it did.

Imagine my confusion when #4 came up to me while I was making brownies that afternoon and said, "WHAT are you putting in those brownies? It reeks like bleach!"  I didn't smell anything and told her so. So she stomped off to her room in a huff, in that special way that only pre-teen girls can. It was about a nanosecond later that I heard screaming and shrieking and thunderous steps running down the hallway back to the kitchen.

Anyone want to guess? You'd be correct. The bleach hit the floor, soaking the vinyl and traveling on to bleach a 3'x1' strip of the girls' bedroom carpet. I don't mean it bleached the carpet a little lighter. What was once beige is now lemon yellow.  I hollered at the kids to grab all the white towels they could find. Of course they bring Egyptian cotton bath towels, but this was no time to be picky, doing the frenzied "Oh, CRAP!" hop on the towels over the bleach, to make sure it didn't spread further. That pic over there--> ? Not MY bleach mark, but it helps make the point.

Have I mentioned that we RENT this house? Yeah.  So. Back to the story. The oldest monsters took the bleach saturated towels to the laundry room for me to deal with in a few minutes, after I turned on the bathroom exhaust fan, opened windows, and banned the children from the bedroom.

Following is my schedule for the next few hours of that day: Toss towels in washer to rinse . Spin. Take brownies I forgot about out of the oven.  Rinse cycle again. Spin. Wash cycle with no detergent. Rinse again. Toss towels in dryer. Go to remove towels from dryer, envision very VERY clean white towels that smell yummy from fabric softener sheet. Stick hand in dryer. Remove hand from dryer, full of terry cloth and Egyptian cotton shred. Contemplate crying. Veto that idea.

The towels.. well, in a previous life they were towels.. now resembled dandelion fluff. in the dryer, in the lint screen, in the dryer guts. This prompted me to cease and desist all laundry efforts until the Daddy could get the whole thing vacuumed out.

BUT... we survived it! I survived the week from Hell. This is a good thing, right? And now... to research carpet dye.....

Images in this post via the Google