Hello Again!

Again, it has been some time since I last wrote, but this time with good reason.  First, the fun reasons:

-We took a family vacation to Hawaii where I didn't access the internet, other than the occasional facebook post for friends living vicariously through us... ok, to make people incredibly jealous of our fabulous life (for one week anyway)

This is a tree I try to take a picture of every time we come here so we can see how she grows.  It's a lovely grassy park next to the hotel.

-Then we took another trip to Las Vegas just the two of us... and my parents, and my sister and brother in law.  My dad was playing in a World Series of Poker event where he did extremely well- no money win, but hey, I'm usually the first one out at any friendly tournament, so over 13 hours of play is pretty kick butt!  Plus, it was nice for the husband and I to connect with each other without L. I can't say enough how important I think it is to get away from your kids even if it is just for the evening.  I know there are some moms out there who are horrified that I would leave her for an entire weekend.  It's not like we locked her in a room covered with newspapers with bowls of food and various sippy cups of water.  (I thought about it- kidding!) She was left with my gracious in-laws who are either too polite to say what a little hellion we are raising or she charmed the pants off of them.

Not sure which.

In any case, it's important to remember that before anything else, there was the two of us.  If you can't remember what that was like, you need to book a vacation right now.

-In between all that, we attended 4 birthday parties, 2 baby showers, and a wedding.  Phew!  It doesn't look like this is going to let up any over the next year!

Now for the less than fun but far more practical.

So, remember in my last post I mentioned the dishwasher was not working.  Well, we had to forgo picking a room out of the bucket and skipped straight to the kitchen.  Because that wasn't the last thing to go in the kitchen.

We had a pretty dramatic situation in the kitchen and I'm not going to lay blame (mostly because this is my fault) but a plastic colander ended up in the oven, and unknowingly the oven was turned on to pre-heat it.  This is how it went down:

I was standing in the living room, well, between the living room and the kitchen watching L play while the oven heated up for dinner.  I hopped on my phone and started reading about the recipe I pinned on Pinterest that was to be the subject of dinner that night.  And like always, I got caught up in a Pin-cycle that got me looking at a billion other things.  That's when I smelled it.  You know, the smoky, chemically smell of charred plastic?

I yelled some obsenities which signalled my husband to come downstairs. 

On a side note, I would like to send big kudos to the team of instructors that taught me everything I know about being a flight attendant- Barb especially.  Her voice seven years after our initial training was still in my head, and allowed me to react quickly and calmly.

I saw the smoke pouring out of the oven, and saw the flames licking the glass door,  and turned off the power.  We got the fire extinguisher, cracked the door of the oven, unloaded the whole thing in a sweeping motion, and shut it back up.  I put the baby and the dog out on the patio so the smoke couldn't get them, and they were contained.  We pulled the circuit breaker.  After a while, we cracked the oven to be sure the flames had died down and this is what we saw:

My favorite colander/wedding present... gone.  Along with a wooden spoon and some silverware.

You can see the fire extinguisher powder on the floor, along with our anemic little fan trying to air what the room.

In our post mortem that night aka, lying in bed talking about what happened, our minds reeled over what went on, and what our next steps would have to be.  How to air out the house, would we have to hire a professional to come clean it, would we need to re-paint just to get the smell out?

Our smoke dectector failed, because of age.  SMOKE DETECTORS NEED TO BE CHANGED OUT EVERY 10 YEARS, NO MATTER HOW MANY BATTERIES YOU KNOW ARE GOOD GO INTO THOSE THINGS!!!  Just wanted to be sure you saw that- sorry for the shouting.
Lesson learned.

I was in denial, assuming we could try to clean it up and move on.  The husband threw his hands up and said, "let's just re-do the kitchen".
Talk about letting the rabbit out of the hat!
I have to contain my excitement a little at this because I have been chomping at the bit since the words, "Will you marry me?" were uttered by him to re-do this kitchen.  I have to be kept in check that this is not a home I am planning on living in for long, so don't go crazy.  Budget set at $2,000 to re-do the kitchen.  Could it be done?  Find out next post.