If you find just the title of this post revolting, count your blessings that you weren’t at my house today.

You may or may not have noticed that the Yenta rarely doles out housekeeping advice. And this picture should tell you why. While it’s not an actual photo of what the wall behind my children’s bunkbed looked like when I pulled it out this morning to retrieve the vaunted Stuffed Blue Bear In the Red Checkered Apron, it’s a enough of a likeness (borrowed from ehagroup.com) to show you that I may have been in a teeny bit of denial that the great NoCal flood a few weeks back has caused a fairly gargantuan science experiment in the crawl space.

Further inspection of what lurked behind every other piece of furniture in the house revealed a veritable green carpet of nastiness, some parts speckled with black, others so thick and furry they might be harboring entire families of gnomes. So rather than my usual schedule of carpool, green tea and blogcruising, today brought an intimacy I’ve never known with scrub brushes, dehumidifiers and copius amounts of bleach. (And a great Hallelujah! to Napoleon’s scientific advisor Claude Louis Berthollet, the man who invented the household chemical that can kill any and all germs while keeping the laundry whites oh-so-bright.)

In the midst of this sanitizing frenzy (which I was actually kind of enjoying since El Yenta Man was wiping down the walls wearing dish gloves and no shirt, serving as eye candy and an example to all husbands everywhere), our 2 year-old daughter was struck with the kind of gastrointestinal affliction parents only whisper about amongst themselves.

All I can say here is every single one of you should call your mothers and thank them for wiping your stinky tushy for all the years you couldn’t do it yourself. I love my children dearly and would chew up their food for them and spit it in their hungry mouths if I had to (which, come to think of it, I’ve done on many occasions) but dealing with someone else’s sh*t, no matter how adorable they are, is not pleasant. Especially if it’s the runny kind.

Grossed out yet? Not as grossed out as I was when I went to mine something from the freezer for dinner after we’d spent the whole day chasing down mold and poopy, and the walls and toddler tush were finally drying out, only to discover the only choices were a three year-old chicken pot pie and a box of escargot hors d’oeurves from Trader Joe’s that I bought while under the illusion that we might still someday host a cocktail party. After a brief discussion on whether buttery snails are kosher (I still can’t figure it out — help, anyone?) El Yenta Man and the kids got the pot pie.

So my apologies for the interruption of Jewish news in this blog; I really do try to stay on track. But you can see some factors came together today for a perfect storm of domestic emergency — along with the news that non-stick pans cause cancer.

Guess that means that damn scrub brush and I are going to be constant companions. Oy.