It started Saturday morning, when Kevin was taking the boys to get goodies from the bakery. The minivan had other ideas, spewing all the power steering fluid onto the driveway. “Where da Jello come from, mom?” asked Nolan.

Then Aaron’s cold took a turn for the worse, as his mild fever cycled in and out. When he’s like this, he wants to be held. Constantly. So sans minivan and por sick toddler, we were housebound.

Aaron’s a gagger when sick, so he gagged and barfed all over himself, us, his bedding and approximately 42 sets of fleecy pajamas during the course of our joyful “family time” weekend. When he wasn’t barfing, his nose oozed. We made a sport of catching his nose before he wiped it one one of the couches. (Aaron: 7 Couches: 42. If a forensic team came in and did one of those black light/check for bodily fluids tests, our living room would glow like that crazy person in every neighborhood who uses 400 strings of holiday lights.

Nolan, who seems bent on destroying our every possession these days (like peeling the facing off my beloved Anne Taintor fridge magnet featuring two guys dressed in 1950s suits with the caption “I discovered housework was a snap when I realized, ‘Hey, I’m a guy!’”), decided to do something he’s never done. I remember reading somewhere in my comments that someone’s husband had removed the toilet to retreive toys a handful of times. I felt a sense of dread in my gut, the dread of premonition. So far, we’d been lucky and escaped the toilet playing with Jackson and even Nolan, though Aaron has developed a keen 6th sense for accessing an open toilet before we can close the bathroom gate or door, a sense he hones often.

So after we caught Nolan flushing the toilet a few times, I discovered that the water wasn’t going down after flushing. The next morning, Kevin asked him what he’d done with the toilet and he listed like 5 toys.

So I go in there and clean the whole toilet and the floor around it. Kevin loosens the bolts on either side of the toilet’s base. One bolt is stuck, so he leans the base to the side and pulls out one of the toys, a Fisher Price knockoff construction worker. Let’s just say that he wasn’t encrusted in Happy Rainbow Fun Glitter. The smell was AWFUL and Kevin was using HIS BARE HANDS. Let the gagging commence! He belly laughed at my gagging, until I reminded him that I wasn’t the one with shit caked on my wedding band.

I have never, ever been more glad I’m not a single mom than I was in that moment. I believe I was even inspired to promise him a blow job a day for the next 30 days. “Write it down!” was his reply.

Next, the toilet cracked in half when he was trying to loosen that other bolt. $180 dollars and more manly heroics from Kevin later, we have a new toilet and toilet seat, which is great since I hated the old ones. This one flushes when you press the handle! What an engineering marvel!

Sunday night I was readying the cool mist humidifier for Aaron’s bedtime when I noticed a sour smell. I mentioned it to Kevin, who glibly suggested from his vantage point of the recliner that I check his bedding. So what did I do? Picked up his soft fleece owl blankie, put it right up to my face and inhaled deeply. The laughter my gagging inspired was the high note to end the weekend.