It Tastes Like Burning!

The wife - a.k.a. She with The World's Coolest Job - is off to a film festival, and my mom took the girls over to a friend's for an all-day playdate. That leaves me here to kick it with my two boys. I'm keeping my motion limited as I'm having a hernia flare-up today. (The fucker usually minds its own business, but has days when it decides to perk up like a Pop-Tart and school me on my mortality.)

Fortunately, it's been calm and peaceful. Except for that moment when I thought the house was burning down.

It was lunchtime. Jaxon and Luka put in a request for pizza rolls. Easy enough; last I had checked, we had a Waltons Family-sized bag of Tortino's in the freezer that I had just bought the day before. I turned the oven on and began rummaging in the ice box; after a few moments of not finding them, I began to wonder whether it was possible per the laws of physics for four children to devour 90 pepperoni pizza rolls in a single sitting.

Just as I discovered the half-depleted bag on the shelf in the freezer door, I smelled it. I'm a father of six, and there was no mistaking that odor. Something was on fire.

I ran to the stove and pulled the door open. There, dangling across and through both oven racks, was a five-foot length of yarn. It was multi-colored: red yarn woven with purple yarn, and a beautiful orange flame riding up the length of both strands. This is the same yarn that's in the kids' craft drawers - the same yarn I've been plucking off of the floor in fractional pieces for a week solid while I curse God for letting Adam and Eve snack on that apple and gain shame over their nudity. As badly as it's been littered across the house, I should've known that one of them would find a way to get it into the device that heats up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

I was actually relieved to find the blazing yarn. The smell was so rank that for a moment I thought the oven had a rotted coil, and was shorting out. And of all the things that could have been in the oven, this may have been the least innocuous. What if one of the brat - er, l'il angels had stuffed a Stitch doll in there? Or one of Neve's American Girls? I can imagine the five-alarm panic that would've ripped through Chez Zero had I opened that door to reveal a Molly flambé.

If you have horror stories about ovens and kids, I'd love to hear 'em. Please, tell me how much worse it could have been.