Sometimes Home Ownership IS like the Movies... when toilets explode

Do you remember the secene in various commedies where someone says, "hey there's a leak here..." and within the next five minutes all the characters are soaked and running around yelling.
Turns out, when your sewer pipe gets blocked, pretty much the exact same thing happens in real life.

So here's the play by play.

Scene: Bradley, the 1.5 year old boy baby, just woke up and he and Mommy are coming down to the basement to visit Daddy as he is finishing building Bradley's new wood toy box. (I am totally not making this up.)

Steph - "Hey hun there is a leak over here, and it's wet!"
Brian removes ceiling pannel and unveils... nothing but dry pipes.
Hmm.
Brian - "Go up stairs and flush the toilets."
Stephanie goes upstairs and proceeds to double flush the main level bathroom, and the guest bathroom upstairs.
Brian - "Hmm, noththing. Go flush it again."
Stephanie gets half way up the stairs - "Hey Brian, the toilet is gurgling!"
Silence as they both watch another leak on another ceiling pannel form.
Suddenly the ceiling pannel turns dark with wettness and starts bowing with the weight of the water from above.
Steph - "Oh MY GOSH!"
Lots of loud water sounds.
Steph - Oh my gosh oh my gosh what do we do!!"

Now we enter action movie mode.

Brian wildly starts yelling out instructions while stephanie continues yelling oh my gosh and executes said instructions.
Buckets are gotten to catch the water, and the water to the toilet is turned off. Brian runs up stairs and begins plunging the now quiet toilet and Stephanie is downstaris finding more buckets to catch the water now dripping from five or six places from their drop ceiling. A whirring sound in the background... All is quiet while Brian gives more instructions and stephanie goes to find more supplies. Everyone things the worst is over.

The whirring stops, the washing machine begins to empty its water and go into the spin cycle. A fountain of water erupts from the toilet.
Up until this point I had also been on the phone with my dad comicly talking about things as they were happening as we also discussed our upcoming trip. I asked, "Um what do you do when water comes out after you've turned of all the water?" I don't remember his response because Brian started yelling, "Call a plumber call a plumber!!!" over and over.

Brian quickly abandones the showering toiled and runs downstairs to try and save the downstairs carpets from damage.

I can clearly remember feeling fairly abandoned at this point. I walked into the kitchen and stood and thought, what do I do what do I do? (You think and say everything twice in an emergency, just like in action movies.) For some reason I could not fathom calling a plumber while water was rushing around. So I grabbed my nicely rolled yoga mat and shoved it in the door way of the bathroom and reinforced it with three rolls of paper towels. Fairly genius I thought. The water level in the bathroom peaked at three inches. Luckily the toiled stopped shooting water everywhere, and I was able to sop up all the water and begin semi cleaning.

And where is Bradley in all this? Running around up and down the stairs. Eventually when people stopped yelling he came to see if things were okay. What a good boy.

We stayed in a hotel that night.