The Corndog Incident

We have afternoon church this year which means that we get to have lazy Sunday mornings and Ralph and I like to lie in bed late, even if we are awake. This morning, with the ongoing drizzle outside, we were encouraged to snuggle deep under the covers rather than get our of bed and face a cold, dreary day. There was some life in the house. We had heard most of the kids get up and make their way downstairs. We had heard cereal poured into bowls and the sounds of pleasant conversations had made their way up the stairs. It was just a quiet, lazy Sunday morning. We rolled over, pulled up the covers and dozed some more.

Suddenly, there was a piercing beeping followed by an automated voice yelling, "Fire! ... Fire!" My first thought was that someone had burned their toast and I started looking for my robe. Then Geral started screaming and I worried that she had burned herself so I bolted down the stairs. I was greeted by a thick, nasty smelling smoke. It was quickly obvious that we were dealing with more than burnt toast. Geral was still screaming even though Sarah had gotten to her. I was wildly looking around the kitchen for the fire but didn't see anything. Steven ran up from the basement saying that Rachel said Geral's corndog was on fire. That was the clue I needed. I opened the microwave and there it was. The blackened remnant of what had once been a frozen corndog. Lauren arrived from the basement carrying a crying Rachel. While we calmed the little girls down, we were able to figure out what happened.

The kids had gotten up and most had had cereal for breakfast then headed down the basement. At some point William had prepared himself a corndog for breakfast. Geral had seen him and decided that she also wanted a corndog. Rachel was more than happy to help her. Unfortunately, Rachel thought that she could do it herself. She had watched the big kids plenty of times and had even pushed the buttons on the microwave with supervision before. Our best guess is that they pushed one of the buttons too many times so that instead of microwaving the corndog for 60 seconds, they did it for 6 minutes or something like that. When smoke started pouring out of the microwave, Rachel headed downstairs to get one of the big kids to help. Then the smoke alarm went off and terrified Geral who was alone in the kitchen.

We got the doors and windows open to air out the house but a stink that big is hard to get rid of and we can still smell it hours later. Rachel hopefully realizes know that although she is getting bigger, there is a reason why we don't let her cook by herself yet. She was scared enough by the incident that I hope the lesson sunk in a bit.