Living in fear of our toilet

This may be an indelicate discussion about poo and toilets, so, if you prefer, please do not read any further.

We are not actually fearful of our toilet. We live in fear of our toilet getting jammed. We know how to use the plunger way too intimately. It is not the grownups that are usually the culprits either, it is one of the children. Not that it is on purpose. But man, since we had kids, you can't believe the stuff that comes out of them. Or not. Or what comes out days after it hasn't. This might be our main problem. Days, and then the breadth and width of stuff is much more than our toilet can handle.

Why is it that, once you have children, you spend a lot of time discussing and worrying as much about what comes out of them, as what goes in them? Nobody told me that it would continue to concern us after the potty training was over. Accidents in the clothes and backed up toilets. Great.

And we get so tired of the plunging. We also get tired of the hurried way we must try to stop the water from an overflow.

We did replace our downstairs toilet because it did get clogged so very often. Mr. Wild is very handy and figured out how to switch out the old for the new. The new we made sure had an extra wide tunnel out, was glazed all the way through, and has a good flush. Apparently many large tester balls could go down the new toilet. (we didn't do the experiments, it was touted on the company's advertising) So far so good, except now we can't seem to make sure the problem child uses the toilet on the first level. It used to be that the lower level was used all the time, so we were plunging that one all the time. Now, the second floor is used, which is a riskier proposition. We found out the hard way, the first time, that an overflow rains down into the lower bathroom. Yuck, yuck, and yuck.

Maybe we should replace the upstairs with a toilet that has a larger, glazed (read smooth and non-catching) outlet, but right now, after all the things that went bad this holiday season, let's just see if we can ride this wave. And convince the kids to use the downstairs.