Well, today was an interesting day to say the least. It started off with an incident that began similar to The Vaseline Incident.
I haven’t seen these poison control Mr. Yuk stickers since I was a kid, but I think they ought to think about bringing them back. Clairey added diaper rash cream to the long list of her pica items (including biting a hole in the drywall, Vaseline, and her favorite-hair barrettes).
Before Elizabeth left for work, she had asked me to fix some invitations she had been working with on the computer before she got home for lunch. So, I parked Claire in front of some Yo Gabba Gabba! (which will be getting its own vitriol laden post I’m sure…) and started to work on the invitations. I wasn’t in the bedroom 2-3 minutes and I started to hear a slurping noise, which was odd since I hadn’t given her anything to snack on yet.
As it turns out, she had eaten approximately half of a brand new tube of Boudreaux's Butt Paste diaper rash cream. You don’t think about it until it happens, but the cutesy little ‘trying to be funny and humorously push the envelope on product names’ takes a turn for the macabre when you have to relay it to the lady at the poison control center. She said it shouldn’t kill her (oh good, thanks for even putting that in my mind), but that she would probably be pretty sick and to keep her hydrated. Claire threw up about an hour later, a white tarlike glop mixed with the red juice she had been drinking and a handful of grapes. It was basically a pile of bird crap. She proceeded to throw up 4-5 more times and has had diarrhea most of the evening. Poor kid. That’s what happens when you eat things meant for your butt, I guess. Hope she’s better tomorrow.
It is so hard with Claire, there is not even a single minute you can take your eye off of her and she is into trouble. It makes getting my schoolwork, job applications, paperwork, projects, and housework next to impossible to work on. If she could only focus her energy constructively, she would have cured cancer by now, I’m sure of it. I think she sits and plots things in her head that she will do the instant we blink.
Then while I was finishing baking our breaded pork chops, I started to smell smoke. This isn’t a rare smell in our neighborhood. Go ahead and Google Maps “Restaurants near Auburn and Lancaster Drive in Salem, OR” and you will get 15,641 results. We smell every grill, every fast food burger, every restaurant, and every taco stand in Salem. This was different though, it smelled like a campfire. I went outside to look around, and noticed that our next door neighbor’s house (about 20 feet away from our house) was on fire!
There was a wooden platform of some kind that was leaning against their house with flames flowing out around the sides, so I didn’t know if the fire was coming from the house or just from this wood. I yelled to Elizabeth to call 9-1-1, which she did on my 3rd request while I was spraying at it with the fire extinguisher. This is the 2nd time we have called 9-1-1 in the past 2 days, and it’s funny the little nervous tremble she gets in her voice while she is on the phone with them.
The fire department got here so fast, they kicked over the burning platform to reveal it was burning on its own. However, they said if left much longer it would have definitely started the siding of the house on fire. They took their axes and chainsaws and cut a huge hole in the side of the house to make sure no fire got into the walls. One of the firemen running back along the house saw the burning wood and said “Oh $(%-- that’s it!?”. Classy.
The fire inspector took my information and a statement after the smoke had cleared, and said that it was most likely the cigarette butts they were discarding in a plastic can that caused it, and that they can smolder for days before igniting something like that. You learn something new every day. A lesson to the smokers out there.
In regular news, we spent Sunday at the Long Family Reunion in Yamhill. My mom was in charge this year and did an EXCELLENT job! Although it was not as well attended as other years, it was awesome. Any given year there are a couple hundred people that attend, we’re related to most of Yamhill and Washington Counties. It’s a shame to see family feuds stand in the way of people coming, and even worse- when two people/families feud, they both don’t come to avoid the other. Their loss I guess, great food and visiting!
You can seriously see the mischief in her eyes.
Then the morning of the 4th, we went to the St. Paul Parade. Claire thought she had died and gone to heaven, all you do is wave and you get candy?!?! We took a trip over the Wheatland Ferry, which we all love. Then we went to Elizabeth’s aunt’s house, and we ended our evening at home spotting all of the illegal fireworks in the sky around our neighborhood. Claire waved goodbye to each burst of light in the sky as it slowly faded away.
All in all, a great holiday weekend.
There had really ought to be a class action lawsuit against the guy that invented the IKEA cam screw. I believe there will be a special kind of hell where one spends eternity holding one 300 pound piece of particle board, threading a headless screw through a 1/16” pinhole- trying to meet up with another 300 pound piece of particle board precariously perched in such a way that you can turn the connector head towards plus with your third hand before it falls out of the hole and crushes your foot. “Place the shmorginshmorgie in the geshmorginforgin and turn the hortenvorten” they say, well I’m not buying it.
