How much damage can a 4-year old cause??? Ha!

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All afternoon I thought I heard the hose running.  But that was impossible, because we keep the hose shut off at the valve indoors (for reasons pertaining to our rough & rowdy boys who would spray & terrorize each other all day long if access to the hose were granted).

So, when my 7 year-old yelled that the carpet in our finished basement was wet, I began to understand why I thought I heard the hose running.

Apparently, my 4 year-old had gone in search of the elusive hose valve.  He located an unused sink in a basement storage room that has a turn-on just like a hose, with a hose-like tube attached (seriously, it was used as a darkroom by the previous owners - we've lived here almost 10 years and didn't realize the sink worked).  He turned the valve on at some point in the day, where it began happily spraying all over my husband's side (think tools) of the jam-packed storage room.  For hours.

I'm glad my eldest found it when he did, but I was greeted to a couple inches of standing water in the storage room, which had seeped into the finished portion of the basement, saturating the carpet.  It soaked the carpet all the way towards the laundry room, where it also saturated rugs under a computer desk.

I called my husband at work, asked how to use the ShopVac on water, and got to work.  I called my parents as back-up to help with the boys, who by this time were over-excited and sloshing through the water, mainly getting in my way.  I had the standing water mostly sucked up by the time they got here.  Almost 15 gallons of it!!!

My husband came home from work, which takes him about 45 minutes, and helped with the rest.

What a night!  The fans & dehumidifier have been doing their job all night, so hopefully it has dried out a bit.

Total destruction:  3 basement rooms flooded, 2 garbage bags full of ruined items from floor of storage room, carpet & area rugs soaked.

Lesson learned:  Never underestimate the destructive force of a 4-year old boy.


If I have to find a silver lining, I guess I could say this:  The storage room has gotten over-stuffed and needed a good going-through.  Guess the time had come!

Thanks for reading the All-Natural Mama blog, home to Wishful Acres Organic Farm.