Cooking with the Gettysburg Family Kids.

Last night as I was downstairs doing a load of laundry, I smelled a smell. A very bad smell. Rich was upstairs with the kids, and I figured perhaps he had burned something while cooking. I'm not sure what it says about our collective cooking skills that he was actually reading in bed and thought I was burning something while cooking. Eventually, he investigated. This was what he found.


That would be what's left of a microwave after your eight year old son thinks he's set the kitchen timer for sixty-nine minutes, but he's actually turned the microwave on for sixty-nine minutes, with nothing in it. Those are the little roller things all melted together in a big pile of plastic.

When Rich arrived, there were fifty-nine minutes left on the clock. The glass plate inside was glowing red hot. Of course, it had also melted. These are the remaining blackened shards of that glass plate in the kitchen sink.



Unfortunately, Rich sort of did a lot of angry yelling, as any father who finds such a situation going on in the kitchen might do. While he was dealing with the broken plate, we heard Shea slip out the front door. Any of you who are familiar with Shea may recognize the cause for alarm in this. Shea went outside. Not to his bedroom, but outside.

Rich took a few deep breaths and followed him outside. When he got onto the porch, Shea was walking down the road. In the rain. Rich called him back and they had some sort of father son discussion which included an apology from Rich for the angry yelling and a story about how Rich almost set this very same house on fire with a toaster oven in his younger years.

I've been wondering all day, where was Shea going to go? Was he just going for a walk around the block? Running away to join the circus? Is this going to be his response in those dreaded teenage years?

The silver lining in all of this is that I hated that microwave and now I get a new one! Shea has even offered to pay us back for it with his allowance.