I am a FLAMING idiot! (LOL!)

Wow! What a morning it has been! Everything started off just fine... I slept until about 9:30 while the kids played Pokemon cards and watched TV. Meagan finally succeeded in bugging me enough to get me out of bed to make breakfast, so I got up and headed upstairs to make a special breakfast of cinnamon rolls.

Oh, it was special alright!

I got the rolls out of the refrigerator, got the baking sheets ready, and preheated the oven. While I was waiting for the oven to get up to temp, I went about my normal morning routine - you know, bathroom, face wash, all that good stuff. When I came back into the kitchen, the oven beeped, indicating it was up to temp. As I walked over to it to put the cinnamon rolls in, though, I noticed smoke rolling off the stove top. Well, there were a bunch of things sitting on the stove - a bag of potatoes, a container of dinner rolls, salt & pepper shakers, etc. I thought somehow one of them had overheated... the potatoes seemed to be the most likely candidate, so I grabbed the bag and moved it straight over to the sink... but it wasn't the potatoes. So I grabbed the container of dinner rolls... not that either. My process of elimination was not working, and the smoke continued to roll.

Thankfully, by this time, Guy had taken an interest in what I was doing, and he came over to help. But he went straight for the oven. He opened the door, and there we found a plastic storage container that had once been filled with tortilla chips... Now, however, the bottom of the container had melted out and oozed all over the oven racks and the bottom of the oven, and the tortilla chips were in a charred pile at the bottom of the oven.

Oh. Um. Ooops. I never even thought to look INSIDE the oven before preheating it. I had COMPLETELY forgotten that Jane used to (and apparently still does) store stuff inside her oven. I had successfully managed to start a house fire. Immediately, the smoke alarms started going off like dominoes all throughout the house. Guy took over with the plastic blob, while I tried to find hot pads or something that he could use to keep from burning himself. So, I ran down in the basement to see what I could find. While I was there, I made a stop at the bedroom to wake Lucas up. My poor husband was awakened today with, "Hey Luc, do you think you could help us? There's a fire in the kitchen." He SHOT UP out of bed (much faster than when I thought there was a dead cat in the bed, I might add), and came upstairs to help. We opened doors & windows & set up a gigantor fan in the kitchen to try to get the smoke to move out of the kitchen.

I then tried to just stay out of the way. I got the kids dressed in case we ended up having to move outside. Then I steered clear. They proceeded to get everything outside to the garage on the concrete floor... the molten plastic blob over oven rack, the pile of char-broiled chips - all of it. There was smoke rolling everywhere, but THANKFULLY everything stayed contained and was put out without incident. Uggh!

All I can say is I felt like a complete moron of epic proportions! Oh well... what's done is done. Thank God we saw it and the men were able to handle it well.

The house is now closed up, we're regaining the heat that we lost with all the cold winter air blasting in from every open door, and the kitchen is relatively smoke free. I even made the cinnamon rolls for breakfast (which I burned, by the way... no joke!).

Moving on...