It all started when I decided to take a shower-bath because I didn’t really want to watch “Jack Reacher” for the second time. I didn’t really want to put a damper on the picks of the posse happening in the livingroom, so I decided I would sneak away to my happy place in the bathroom.

Said “shower-bath” involves re-creating a tropical rainforest Four Seasons style. I light coconut candles, turn off the lights, use a nice tropical sugar scrub, and fill the bath tub with water and Lavender salts. I play music, and sometimes my dog joins me and lies right up against the tub (no, not in it.)

On this occasion, she didn’t. That’s relevant later. As I soaked up my sensorial paradise, I felt my shoulders drop and neck muscles sigh. That’s the last thing I remember before hearing my son say, “Mom, you’re making the carpet squishy.”

“Hunh? Oh. Okay,” I manage between fade outs. Teens.

The next thing I knew my husband was pounding on the door. “YOU NEED TO GET OUT! You’ve been in here for two hours. Water IS EVERYWHERE.”

Two hours? How was the water still hot? Disoriented and fairly certain he was exaggerating, I stepped out into a shallow lake. This is where if my dog would have been laying nearby, she would have (a) soaked up the excess water happily and (b) nudged me Lassie-style in a rescue scenario worthy of TNT reruns.

As those two things did not happen, the small pond had dispersed (as ponds with weak borders will) under the cabinets and into both rooms that back up to the bathroom. The hallway squished. My relaxing bath was sucked up into the carpet sucker which my husband used to suck up 13 gallons of water. (He’s a much better carpet sucker than I am.)

As you may imagine, we needed back up. Our carpet cleaners came the next day, looked at each other and said, “This is going to be too much for us.”

Only at this point did it really sink in how bad this was. Embarrassed, I called Service Pro who responded right away with big fans and non-judgement. I appreciated both. My husband disassembled the bed in the backroom (here you must know we’re 2 pink flamingos away from redneck using a waterbed frame circa 70s with a California King mattress hailing from the same era plopped inside). This was no easy task to disassemble the very heavy solid oak frame. Pieces were everywhere throughout the house.

With everything set in place, we headed out of town for a swim meet,  relieved we wouldn’t be listening to the piercing hum of dryer fans accompanied by the squealing sucking sound of the dehumidifier put in place to balance this ecosystem somehow. We were, however, slightly concerned something could malfunction and nobody would be there to put the flames out.

Sure enough, when we returned, the dehumidifier had reversed somehow and water was now spewing out instead of sucking into the sink. “Cody? Ummmm. We’ve got an issue.” Cody’s response was not comforting. “Shoot. I hope there’s not more damage there then there was before.”

Yeah, us, too. Cody came out on a Sunday, fixed her up, and took the weeping dehumidifer away leaving a trail of tears down the driveway. Poor thing. She tried. But because she’d malfunctioned, when we returned from our meet the house felt like the Sahara in a summer wind storm. (Did I mention the breaker keeps flipping in the 100+ heat?) It fast became clear why dehumidifers are an important player in water damage scenarios.

Back to the waterbed frame. A few days later, I was rounding the corner to go tell my son good night and forgot to account for the old bed frame pieces still in the hallway. BAM! I broke my toe. Yep. Right in half.

So, in the words of my German son who put it so logically, the moral is this: if you don’t want to break your toe, don’t fall asleep in the bathtub.

And that’s the story about how relaxing too much got me in trouble.