More Excitement

The excitement never ends around here! I have been in high gear cleaning mode the past couple of days. Yesterday morning at 7:30 I was sitting on my kitchen counter scrubbing my blinds on my kitchen window!

After that I figured I'd go whole hog and clean my oven...or, well, let the oven clean itself but you catch my drift.

I took the racks out and looked at the bottom of the oven. It didn't look nearly as bad as it did the last time I "cleaned" it so I closed the door, flipped the latch, and pressed the "self clean" button. About 20 minutes into it Max walked in the kitchen to talk to me and said, "Mom, why is there a fire in the oven?" I was thinking he was seeing the red heating element at the bottom and was just getting ready to say this as I turned around to look in the oven...

...Uh, my oven was on fire! It wasn't huge and it was contained in the oven but there was definitely flames and they were getting bigger. I turned off the self clean and picked up my cell phone. I told the kids (all of use were still in our pj's) to go out the front door and wait in the front yard for me because had to go upstairs and get Ruby out of her crib.

As I am doing this I am calling 911. Max is freaking out in the open front door calling for me to "GET OUT OF THERE". I am trying to reassure him and talk to the dispatcher at the same time. By the time I get downstairs with Ruby I peek into the kitchen praying it wasn't coming out of the oven but the fire had put itself out. I told the dispatcher this but she said she'd send the fire dep't anyway...I agreed!

We all got outside and waited until the fire truck got there. Max, Abby, and Lucy stayed outside with one of the fire fighters while I took the other two inside. The latch on the oven door was still locked and they said it was more than likely the stuff on the bottom of the oven that had caught fire. She said it should be fine but if something didn't seem right later then to call them back.

All that before 9am...what a way to start the week!

Needless to say, I got a scrub brush and used LOTS of elbow grease to scrub the bottom and sides of the oven before I made our baked potatoes for dinner last night. When I turned the oven on to preheat it I was hoping I'd be able to just bake the potatoes and not turn them into briquettes! Anyone order potatoes flambe?

That will more than likely be the only event that Max and Abby relate to their teachers about what they did over the summer..."Uh, the fire truck had to come to our house because my mom caught the oven on fire and we got to go on the fire truck!" Great...