Life in a sitcom

Sometimes my life seems like an episode of "I Love Lucy". I had a few of those moments this week. Moments when I actually felt like I stepped into TVland. All that's missing is red hair and Ethel.

Monday morning I noticed a bit of black ooze under my fridge. I immediately thought about how expensive it would be to replace our fridge. Then I wondered why motor oil would be leaking out of the fridge. Hmm. How doofey can I be? In an attempt to try to solve the riddle, I opened the fridge door and was greeted by a gallon of homemade tomato soup. Dripping from the second shelf, filling the lower level then oozing in small streams onto the floor. There it sat oozing and turning black, all...night...long.

Where do you even start? First, I took the offending bag of soup out of the fridge.

"Bag?!" You say.

Yes, a bag. A big ol' gallon ziploc bag. One of those nice sturdy ones that I like to fill with soup then freeze. One of the kind that they do wacky stuff with in the commercials. One of the kind that has an inch long slice in the side to allow foodstuffs to spew out in your fridge...wait...

Yep, upon examination, there is a perfect inch long slit in the side of the bag. I gulp and call my cleaning crew. Which consists of Ella and Eli. Everett is heavily entrenched in the American Revolution right now. He's unaware of the horrors going on in the kitchen. One kid dispenses papertowels to me, the other holds a Wal-mart bag for the trash. I have to sop up the soup (say that 5 times fast) then empty the lower racks into the sink. Sadly, my fridge needed to be cleaned, it's unfortunate that it took this to make me do it.

The fridge looks grand. I didn't bother cleaning the upper racks. It is the middle of the school day, you know.

Then lunch comes. We eat. I momentarily forget that I am a responsible mother. I pass out hard candy to my children. I leave the room. I return to find my youngest choking. I'm not talking about an I-will-be-okay-cough. I'm talking about a DIAL-911-he's-going-to-die-choke. I rub his back and encourage him to cough if he can. I realize I'm a complete fool because I don't know how to properly Heimlich a small child. He is in a situation that would require this, I fear. He's slobbering, I'm maintaining a facade of calm. I feebly attempt a heimlich when he spews a piece out. He spits up in my hand a bit. Then he turns to me and full on retches. All over. I honestly don't care, because he's okay, allbeit covered in vomit. But that makes two of us. So we hug a vomity hug and I cry. Long and hard. I thank God that the nasty piece of candy came out. Rule #278 is born. "No hard candy, large lollipops that can be broken into small pieces, or anything that slightly resembles hard candy allowed in our house."

As I'm changing out of my tomato soup and vomit clothes, I wonder, "Why?" You know? Why did we need to sop up the mess or see Eli almost die (he was straining to breath so hard that he popped blood vessels in both of his cheeks). I don't feel like a better mom because we made it through 'A Day.' Getting into clean pants I pause and think, "God, is this your refining fire? Because I didn't expect it to be so messy. I don't feel refined. I feel nasty and tired."

Yeah, I'm spiritual like that.

Since I didn't learn the intended lesson the first time, you will never guess what greeted me Wednesday morning. Black ooze under the fridge, again. I'm pretty laid back about it this time, just figuring that I hadn't got it all the other day. I'm kind of slow in the morning. Cut me some slack, I get up EARLY. I open the fridge and blast it all if the second bag of tomato soup hadn't tipped over and leaked from the top shelf down. Let me interject that there wasn't a hole in this one, it just leaked, and this leaking has never happened to me before. Evidently, I really need to learn something from this, because it didn't just leak along the edges of the fridge this time. It filled up each shelf, saturating every item on the shelves until it reached the drawers then filled them too.

Now, I've got some experience in cleaning tomato soup out of fridges. I've also got some experience with not trusting advertisers of gallon ziploc bags. What else shall I learn from this? That I can make time in the middle of my day to scrub the shelves of the fridge? Ella and Eli make good helpers, if I give them detailed instructions? Perhaps the lesson would be that Everett, once 'into' a book, may not notice if a nuclear bomb dropped in our kitchen and he certainly would not help clean up any mess leftover from it.

My fridge is certainly the cleanest, prettiest it's been since it left the showroom. Here's a picture to prove it. And, yes, there was food in the fridge before 'the incident' and we went to the grocery store to replace it all that afternoon. Sigh.