Things I never thought I would have to say or do

When I became a mother, I knew to expect the unexpected. I knew that things weren't going to be rainbows and rosebuds every moment of every day. I can deal with that. However, I never realized how humorous being a mom could be, even though, at the time, they did not seem so humorous.


For instance, when Bryce was around 2, he thoroughly enjoyed hiding things in random places. It was a game and I often giggled when I found a weeble in my make up drawer, or a bouncy ball in one of the pots in the kitchen. I did NOT giggle, however, the day I turned the oven on to preheat and soon discovered a blanket had been stashed in there. He made the deal even sweeter by hiding 2 of his plastic fishbowl toys IN the blanket, which, ultimately, melted all over my oven. Plastic does not come out of an oven easily. When you try to cook it off in the clean cycle, plastic breaks your oven element.


For the longest time, I had the kitchen gated off to prevent such incidents from happening again.

And then we moved.

To a house where you can't really gate off the kitchen.

But, Bryce was older and knew better than to get into the oven. Brady never showed any interest in it.

Until today.

I went about my early afternoon chores and discovered it was time to start dinner. I needed something quick and nutritious. I decided on baked pork chops. I set the oven to preheat. I put it on convection because it preheats it faster. I realized we didn't have any bread crumbs and decided to make chicken Alfredo instead. I defrosted some chicken. And I started to smell this odd smell. I checked the chicken. Seemed ok. I started cutting garlic. I realized there was an awful lot of smoke in the kitchen. I turned around. I saw A LOT of smoke coming from my oven.



It wasn't pretty. By the time i had the oven off and the windows open, the smoke alarms were going off. At this time, Travis arrived home.


*Note to self, smoke alarms blaring out of open windows when hungry hubby arrives home from a long day at work aren't a good idea.*




*Note to Trav, remarks about my cooking abilities while I am trying to recover from a disaster are also not a good idea*.


We discovered that the water jugs you receive in the hospital when you have a baby are not oven proof. My oven, thankfully, is ok. My water jug, however, is not.


The oven is now locked and will forever remain so until the children are in college. Even then, it will only remain unlocked while they are away at school. Who knew that telling your children the oven is hot and will burn them isn't enough? Apparently you have to tell them, explicitly, that you can not put plastic things in there, either.