My horrible Sunday night!

Man, I don’t think I’ve had a night this bad in a long time! At first all was going well. R, J and I had gone to town in the early afternoon and done some shopping at gotten lunch. Then when we got home J took a nice long nap and R and I watched a movie. We didn’t get the movie finished when T (my older son) called me to chat. We had a nice long talk, which is a rare treat. (He’s doing well, by the way.) Then J woke up in a happy and playful mood. Soon I decided it was time to start thinking about supper. But J was too hungry to wait. Or so I thought.

I heated him up some spaghetti oh’s and sat him in his chair. He had maybe six bites and was telling me he was “all done.” I tried several things to get him to eat, but he is just not eating much at all lately. Anyway, he eventually got down from his chair without having eaten very much. I left the bowl of spaghetti-oh’s on the table thinking that I would try again later, and if he didn’t eat them I would save them for another time. I got back to work on supper. I was making twice baked potatoes, steak and broccoli. J was playing happily and R was watching another movie. Right in the middle of spooning the filling back into the potatoes I hear a very wet plopping sort of sound. I turn my head and see J-man absconding with the bowl of spaghetti-oh’s, and a huge pool of tomato sauce and noodles on my dining room carpet. I ran to stop him from going any further and in trying to get away from me he waved his little arms in the air, flinging about two more huge pools of round pasta and red sauce on the floor. I grabbed him and looked up at R with a “help me” expression on my face. J had spaghetti-oh’s in his hair and on his hands and clothes. R said, “I’ll get the shop vac.” I took J to the sink and began to get him cleaned up. Of course, once he was clean all he wanted to do was go stomping through his fresh new puddles. I was restraining him and he was telling me what he thought of that in no uncertain terms.

R asked me if I knew where an extension cord was. I went down the hall and when I went to turn on the light, I accidentally flipped the wrong switch, cutting the power to the TV and DVD player, and loosing R’s place in the movie. R began to suck up spaghetti oh’s while I was holding a screaming wriggly toddler. He got about halfway done and I looked up into my living room to see that the whole house had filled with a fine dust from the shop vac. Sort of a mix of dirt and sawdust. Nice and aromatic. NOT! (cough, cough.) I got his attention and told him he was filling the house with dust. He got an annoyed expression on his face, but went ahead and sucked up the rest, then tossed the shop vac into the garage in aggravation.

I was finally able to let J go run around, and R got a rag and cleaned the tomato sauce out of the carpet, as I got back to work on supper. By this time R’s annoyance level has reached caution level. He takes the DVD out of the player and puts it away. He’s resigned to the fact that he won’t see any movie in it’s entirety tonight. He settles into his chair with a book. I put the potatoes and steaks into the oven with the broiler on.

ENTER STUPIDITY FACTOR 12!!!

A little background interjection here. J-man, in all his independent toddler-y-ness, has learned to open the oven door. He usually only does this when I am cooking, since seeing me open the door and put something inside reminds him that, hey, this is something to play with! So, for a month or two now, I have been in the habit of flipping over the latch for the self cleaning function of the stove in order to keep J from being able to open it while it’s hot. I *thought* that would engage some sort of cycle that prevented you from opening the oven again, but that had not happened the first time or two that I tried this trick, so I concluded that either it didn’t work this way, or mine was broken. Either way, for me and my little oven, using the cleaning latch was an effective toddler safety tool.

Till last night…..

My first timer went off and I pulled on the latch and it wouldn’t move. (hmmmm) Perhaps it’s stuck. (jiggle jiggle jiggle) Maybe you have to turn off the oven before it will come undone. (turn off oven. no problem.) It still won’t budge. (your steaks are burning) Try harder. Voila! The latch moves. But not all the way over. (uh oh) I move it back. But not all the way over. (crap) Push, tug, push, tug. Oven still locked. (expletive, expletive, EXPLATIVE!!!) Deep breaths. You’re going to have to get R. (I can’t do that.) You have no choice. (He’s already annoyed.) The food will be ruined. (The food hell, the OVEN is ruined!) Call R in here. You know you are not going to get this open. I think you’ve bent the lever. (do you know how stupid that is?) Yeah, but it’s even stupider not to fess up. (I’m such a moron.) It’s ok. He’ll be able to get it open and he’ll laugh at you, but it’s ok. (sigh) “Honey……can you come here please?”

And guess what? HE COULDN’T GET IT OPEN EITHER!!! He wrestled with it quite a bit and concluded that it was not going to open. Yep, I’d bent the lever. I sat on the kitchen floor in despair. He went outside for a smoke. His annoyance factor had now reached critical mass. I’m sitting on the floor crying. I’ve ruined supper. I’ve ruined my oven. OH, GOD, I’VE RUINED MY STOVE! I can’t get that food out of there. The meat is just going to rot and stink and get full of bugs. I can’t afford a new stove.

Enter sweet J-man. He comes up to me and loves on me and talks to me. I take him in the living room and change his diaper and play with him. Crying intermittently all the while. Finally, he goes off playing on his own. I set my jaw. I wipe my eyes. I am determined. I WILL wrestle the hell out of that oven. It will NOT defeat me! (after all, I can’t jack it up any more than it’s already jacked up.)

I can’t even tell you what I did. I pushed and pulled and shoved and heaved and finally to the lever to move, but the door would still not open. Eventually, and I have no idea how, I got the door open. There inside sat the most beautiful golden topped twice baked potatoes, and some nice steaks. They were not burned. I pulled them out, flipped the steaks over and put the steaks back in and turned the broiler on.

The oven door will not close all the way. At this point, I do not care. I get the steaks done and cook up some broccoli. I go and put J to bed. Then I serve up our nice romantic (choke) steak dinner. R and I sit in silence most of the way through the meal. Then he notices the oven door. He asks me why the door is open. “It won’t close because the lever can’t go all the way over from the way it’s bent. I’m going to have to take a BFH to the latch.” He just shakes his head.

Later we settle in to watch the rest of the movie we started earlier. We get through about another hour before both our eyelids are getting heavy. We go on to bed. About 45 minutes later J wakes up crying. To make that incredibly long story short, J finally fell asleep about two and a half hours later. By that time I was so wide awake that I just stayed up and finished the movie.

All in all it was NOT a good Sunday. I’m sure I’ll look back on it all and laugh…..

Someday.