One Perfect Mess

Archive for May, 2011

I decided to do something very rare this past week and be a good wife. I knew Andrew was going to have a hectic morning at work so I dragged myself out of bed, got dressed (if you don’t understand the sacrifice of getting dressed then you are not one of my people) and took the kids to school so that he could get to work an hour or so earlier. I have been having a really hard time finding anything I want for breakfast lately and this morning was no exception. I decided to run in the grocery store on the way home to pick up some dishwashing detergent as we’d been having to run the dishwasher with just water since running out. While there I threw some French Bread Pizzas in the cart figuring what the hell, that would make a quick and yummy breakfast. What’s not to like? Greasy cheese, crunchy bread and you can be eating it within about five minutes if your play your cards right. Score.

I made a beeline for our trusty toaster oven as soon as I got home to get it preheated. Meanwhile I threw the pizza in the microwave for a couple of minutes, loosely following the quick bake instructions I seem to recall seeing somewhere on the box in the 90′s. Something caught my eye as I was putting the groceries in the fridge and I noticed flames shooting up from the bottom of the toaster oven. This isn’t really an unusual sight per se, because I have a general dislike of taking it apart to clean it. Frequently I find that cheese has melted off of something or other onto the heating unit and it will just burn off. Ahem. See no cleaning necessary! Made of win. I continued on putting things away and snagging my half baked pizza out of the microwave. Huh, still burning…. those flames look kind of big. Woah, is this thing spreading? Wonder if I should like, unplug it? Being the dedicated social media junkie I am, I snagged my phone and took a picture.

This went on for a few minutes. Alright maybe like ten minutes, and finally I began to wonder if I should intervene. Can a toaster oven explode? At some point might the flames escape from the toaster and catch other things on fire? I stopped to consider what a responsible adult might do and I formed a plan. I grabbed a pair of potholders and hauled the entire thing out to the backyard where I sat it in the grass. I texted my husband to let him know what was going on. It went loosely like this:

Me: Toaster’s on fire

Andrew: Turn it off and unplug it.

Me: *eye roll* Got that covered

Andrew: Is it contained in the oven?

Me: No honey, the cabinets are on fire too and I thought I’d stop and take the time to text you. WTF?

I imagine at the point he was satisfied that his capable wife had things under control as I didn’t get a response. I let it sit in the grass where it continued to burn for a solid twenty minutes. I hope it still works because I hate trying to find a good toaster oven.

Last weekend the Weebles had her first ever dance recital. I was a little nervous about how she would do since they do have it at an auditorium at Duke with curtains, dimmed lights, the works. Up until the last few weeks of class she cried at drop off. Every. Damn. Time. So I didn’t have high hopes. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if she refused to get on stage at all. The fact I paid $200+ for four costumes, $40 for a DVD, $50 for the *recital fee* and another $60 for tickets all in addition to the hundreds shelled out for the year of classes pretty much guaranteed that she wasn’t going to want to dance.

I stand corrected. The girl was downright giddy. While no class of 3 year olds is going to look particularly coordinated, I was very pleased with their efforts. Nobody cried, nobody stood perfectly still… well at least not the entire time. This is where I would ordinarily include some super cute pictures of little girls in their tutus except there was a no camera policy… the huh? Yep, allll that money and I wasn’t allowed to take a single picture of it. They actually had people walking up and down the aisle threatening to kick you out if they so much as saw a camera. I took a twitter vote: insane.

For Mother’s Day Andrew asked the kids to draw me cards depicting favorite things about Mommy. This is what I got.

Cute huh? Weebs clearly traced over her daddy’s letters and heart and then decided to add a little picture. Can you guess what it is?

Fucking awesome.

For the record, I’m pretty sure my husband’s card would have looked pretty much the same if he’d drawn me one.