Chrismas Eve...Said style

So for all who know us...nothing ever runs smoothly - partly our fault and karma kickin major booty and yes...some of it can be quite amusing. Christmas Eve was yet another adventure at the Said's. After asking for 7 years, Billy and I finally got to host Christmas. I was in my glory and ridiculously excited to have everyone over & spend Christmas together, hoping to make it special for everyone at my house. No surprise to you - Billy and I are both major procrastinators so it will come as no surprise that we were NOT prepared and enjoying a relaxing Christmas Eve like "normal" people. At 5:00 PM, I had not cleaned most of the house, had not wrapped one single present and had not pre-cooked anything for tomorrow's big feasts (yes, two of them). Billy and I set our game plan, split the list of things to do and started at it. While he went to the store for various last minute items, I started cleaning the bathrooms. After I cleaned the toilet bowl in the first bathroom, I flushed it and to my frantic shock, it just started over flowing. EVERYWHERE. There was nothing visual in the toilet, no one had used it recently to my knowledge and I had no idea what to do. As I helplessly screamed for Hannah (who seriously is my angel in every way) I ran to the kids bathroom to see yet another toilet completely overflowing with water - a toilet that had not even been flushed. Hannah turned off the water for me (thank god...I would not have been able to bend that way much less turn the %$@* thing off) and I called Billy. Both bathrooms were totally soaked with crap water and smelled...well...like crap! Billy calmly told me to clean them up and he would be home soon. I made a feeble attempt at cleaning up all the water with a bunch of old towels and waited for hubby to come home. Billy spent the next few hours trying to fix the plumbing to no avail. He even pulled off the toilets, which by the way was impressively disgusting. By about 10PM, we started calling friends to see if we could borrow a toilet snake. All the people we called were 1. quite amused at the whole situation and 2. not surprised at all that it was us on the other end of the phone asking for a toilet snake that late on Christmas Eve. After borrowing a snake from Mom & Dad McClure and that not working, Billy called in reinforcements and had his dad come over. The bathroom in our bedroom was still working perfectly so my initial freak out of "How the hell are we going to have Christmas tomorrow here with 26 people and no toilets" dissolved and the freak out of "How the hell am I going to get everything on this list done since Billy needs to fix the plumbing" set in. It was somewhere around 10:30 that I popped open a bottle of wine, grabbed my Christmas music, headed to my bedroom to START wrapping and said F-IT to everything. The tub in the kids bathroom revealed the source of the plumbing problem as it over flowed as well with little pellets of hamster poop and pink extremely absorbant hamster bedding. Apparently Alex cleaned the hamster cage the last time by flushing all of the bedding down the toilet. The water flooded part of Hannah's room downstairs and it was determined by Billy and Bill Sr. that the problem needed a plumber. At around 1:00 AM, they closed both bathroom doors and declared them "out of service". I don't know what time we made it to bed, but by Christmas morning all the presents were wrapped and under the tree, Santa had made his yearly visit, the house was full of holiday magic and it was as clean as it was going to be.....Merry Christmas Eve!