Little W’s Mathematical Experiment

Oh my! What a week we have had! DH was home sick both Thursday and Friday. I have been sick since Friday. We slept until noon Friday and Saturday! And we needed groceries and it is so cold outside and no one wanted to go, but DH decided he would go get a few things. Being sick and having my mind set on one way to do things, we got in an argument. He left to get groceries; I was still mad.

While he was gone, I started supper. Lost track of Cutie Boy, assuming he was with his sisters playing because they were making enough noise for me to think the whole neighborhood of kids was in the next room. I went about my business of making supper and DH came home and we worked together while working out our argument. I left the kitchen to go and check on the laundry. I had to go by the bathroom to get to the washer and out of the corner of my eye saw W there.

At first I didn’t think anything of it but then realized that he was putting hand towels in (I thought they were going in) the toilet! I almost lost it but I didn’t. “What are you doing?!?!?” DH came running to see what my exclamation was about. I was trying to remove W from the general area as well as remove the towels from the toilet and holding Baby R in my other hand! I lifted the towels (about four of them) to find rolls of toilet paper – whole rolls – filling the toilet bowl!! FILLING! RIGHT FULL! I saw the empty bag on the floor but could not remember how many had been in there.

J said, “I’ll take over.” So I stood back and let him. I brought him a trash bag to put the ruined rolls in and walked away not really wanting to know how bad the damage would be! Cutie Boy was told to sit on the bottom step and not move until supper (not that long away). I never did get to the laundry but went back to making supper while J finished in the bathroom.

I later asked J about what he found in the toilet. He was able to save 4 rolls that didn’t get wet and thankfully, W had not flushed the toilet but there were two rolls that were soaking and moved to a trash can!

So in thinking about this incident, and being a homeschooling mom, I have been trying to come up with something educational from this experience. It was a lesson in volume. He was experimenting to see how many toilet paper rolls it would take to fill the toilet bowl. (I hope I’ve used the right term, but regardless, I think you get the idea.)

Now, someone I told about this incident earlier, brought the following to mind:

What if he’d unrolled all those double rolls of toilet paper and put them in the toilet????

Not going there.