Not what I had planned for a Wednesday night.

Michel walked in the door just home from work and found me in the kitchen.

"Where're the kids?" he asked.

"Who?" I joked. I was in a good mood. It was one of those nights that I cherish being a stay-at-home mom, because dinner was made, kids fed, house clean, kids in the tub... and it's not even dark out yet. We'll have plenty of time to watch Scooby Doo in our pajamas.

That's when Nathan runs into the kitchen... wet, naked and crying.

Michael saw him first. "What's wrong, buddy?"

To my complete horror, he didn't answer. He just turned and ran back to the bathroom, where now I hear his brother and sister crying hysterically.

I run. Someone must be dying.

"What's wrong? What's wrong?" We're both shouting. "Are you hurt?!"

I am frozen for a minute taking in the scene. The children are all conscious, no one is clutching a head or elbow or toe. No electrical appliances in the tub. I don't see blood.

What I do see is water. Everywhere. The tub is leaking, and by leaking I mean it is emptying all over the floor like a pregnant woman's water just broke. Swoosh. Water is streaming across the bathroom floor and out the door. And this is no ordinary tub. It's a huge jacuzzi tub. It holds a lot of water.

"It's okay. It's just water," I repeat over and over again in my most soothing voice. Michael is trying to pull the drain out of the tub while I lift rugs and baskets on the floor. As I lift a bath rug, I uncover a drain in the floor. Of course! Open the drains. Problem solved. Kind of. The drain by the toilet is completely clogged. By what? I have to wonder. Yuck. The other drain is situated at the highest point in the bathroom and apparently the bedroom, too, because by now, the water has reached the foot of my bed and is threatening to go out into the hall. It's flowing away from the drain.

No problem. We have a squeegee on a broom stick. I spend the next 40 minutes squeegeeing the floor, while the kids look on completely traumatized. They start talking about death.

"Is daddy old?" they want to know. "Why is his hair white?"

That's how terrified they were. They thought the bathroom would just keep filling up with water, fill the whole house and we would drown. Their lives flashed before their eyes. They came face-to-face with their own mortality. They needed to be reassured that all was well with the world.

Not my best side.  

Traumatized survivors of the great tub flood.

It turns out that a piece of the tub simply broke off. For some random reason, the genius engineer who designed this fab, non-functioning jacuzzi tub thought it would be a good idea to drill holes in the bottom of the tub and then plug them with cheap chrome-like plastic. Clearly not road-tested for nine months of use by three squirming rug rats.

The good news is that the floor in now really, really clean.