Category: Kids and Parenting

Yesterday was one of those days.

Actually, not all day. Just the part after I picked Isaiah and Leah up from school. That part.

The kids were scheduled to go to a class at a local church later that evening, so already the stress factor was present. Because there was a TIME-LINE, you know?

Only a certain amount of minutes were available to do homework and cook dinner and dress the kids and make myself presentable and get out of the house. So it wasn’t exactly good when Isaiah announced that he had left supplies at school that he needed for a project due the next day.

But we stopped at the store, because what can you do? The library was right next door, so we had to stop there too. All of that would have been fine.

But then we did homework. Leah decided to cry because she had to write “seventeen” as 17 instead of 71. She’s still at the stage where she’s not too concerned about the order, as long as she gets all the info written down.

And then it was time to make dinner. Which started out all right, because when I placed a glass lid on a burner and then turned that burner on, I noticed quickly enough. So no harm was done.

But then a cup of water got spilled on the coffee table where we’d placed all of the library books. It was only a quarter inch of water, but do you know how much water is in a quarter inch? About a gallon. Even that was sort of OK, because it mostly missed the library books and soaked one of our own books. Which will dry eventually.

Except that just as I was getting the gallons of water wiped up, I realized that Leah was taking stickers out of a library book and putting them on a piece of paper. I told her not to worry about the ones she’d already stuck, but that she couldn’t use any more, because it wasn’t our book. She got distressed that she’d done something “bad,” so I assured her it wasn’t serious and that other kids would just take the stickers if she hadn’t. But to rectify her error, she decided it was necessary to peel the stickers off of the paper and put them back on the book’s sticker page.

Which would have been fine too, if that’s what she wanted to do. But the whole time, she wailed about how she wanted a book with stickers and the other kids were going to take these stickers. Or something. Man, little girls cry a lot.

I sent her to her room to cry it out or whatever.

Right about this time, I realized that all the while I’d been wiping up the water and trying to preserve the library book’s stickers, bacon had been frying in my pan. And it was done. And then some.

I rescued the bacon and continued with dinner prep, all to the sound of crying. And Chris came home somewhere in the middle of this.

Then I turned the wrong burner on (again) and a piece of paper towel that was on the counter by the edge of the stove lit on fire. Yes, FIRE.

I don’t know what to do about fire.

Except scream. I knew to do that. And I shoved it onto the stove, because stoves don’t burn and counters do.

My screams for help brought my husband running. When he saw flaming paper towel, he said, “Don’t just stand there!” But I hadn’t just stood there. I’d shoved it onto the stove to burn, hadn’t I? Gosh.

So he turned the burner off, because I HADN’T thought to do that (I’m not very good under pressure). And he hit it with a towel or something. While Isaiah tried to offer helpful suggestions like, “Water! Water!”

My husband saved the day (Well, he saved the moment anyway. I think the day was a little far gone at this point.)

We finally sat down to dinner. Leah’s face was still flushed from her tears and the smell of burnt bacon lingered in the air. Isaiah cheerily announced:

“At class tonight, when they do that prayer request time, I’m going to say, ‘that the fire thing would never happen again.'”

Um, yes Son. We’d prefer it to never happen again. But the truth is, it’s actually the second time I’ve lit paper towel on fire via a stove top burner… so the odds aren’t good. Maybe he’s right to ask for prayer about that one.