At least I learned something from it...

I learned two things today:

1. You should clean your oven after you bake a pizza and it drips cheese on the heating element.

2. My fire alarms work.

So now that my a/c is working again (don't worry. we're only breaking all kinds of heat records down here, and have had extreme heat advisories issued for three days now. we were only without a/c in half our house for 5 days. no big whoop) I decided to bake some brownies (this is after sitting around all day eating bon bons, of course, because that's what I do).

I turned on the oven to preheat it, and remembered when the house started to fill with that nasty burnt cheese smell that the last thing I baked was one of those huge take-and-bake pizzas from Costco. And really now, who has a pan big enough for one of those? So I open the oven and saw that most of the cheese was stuck to the top rack and decided just to set this rack outside on the back porch to let it cool so I can clean it later. Of course, I did not let this minor setback deter me from my goal of making brownies. I return to the kitchen to see the pleasant glow of a fire coming from my oven. It only took me a second to snap out of my cozy fireplace fantasy and realize this was a FIRE! IN MY KITCHEN! Just this morning I was reading an article in the Republic about familiarizing your children with the sound of your smoke alarms so they know what to do if they ever hear them. I thought that was a fantastic idea. Unfortunately I'd never done that. So when the smoke alarm starts going off (and mind you, this is in the middle of nap time, so I was relishing the SILENCE in our house), Fisher races out of his "quiet time" to see what the commotion was, and the babies, whose in-room smoke alarm was conveniently going off, are now awake.

Here's me. I TRIED TO BLOW THE FLAMES OUT. Like it was my birthday cake or something. They got a little bigger. I wasn't quite sure what to do next, since we don't have a fire extinguisher in the house. I had to think for a second: is this a grease fire? NO! I can use WATER! I had it out in a jiffy. I'm smart like that.

So anyway, lessons learned. Just thought I'd share. Off to clean my oven.