Near death Tuesday

I wrote this post like a week ago but I kept forgetting to get pictures of the toaster and Otter. I'm visual so I really feel that it is important to have pictures with my stories. And smart phones make it so easy to illustrate my point. 

So last Tuesday I was scrambling and egg and the doorbell rang. (That happens more than one would think) So I turned the stove off and I turned to start to walk to the door and noticed that there was a 4 inch flame in the toaster oven. A piece of burnt something had caught fire. I thought to myself, This is it. This is how I burn down the house. I went into panic mode and thought, I can't pour water on it, it's a toaster oven. How do I put out a flame in a toaster oven?! So I told myself be calm and handle the situation. It's just a tiny flame. Your house is not on fire. What would Dan do? So I turned off the toaster oven and unplugged it. The flame went down and then a few seconds later completely out. Whew that was close. 

(Here's our toaster right next to the super flammable paper calendar...)

It was my neighbor at the door. My house is such a circus these days when the doorbell rings. First the big loud dogs bark and I yell at them to stop barking and try to get them to sit or lay down so they don't run over to the door and scare whoever is on the other side (and run over a kid and escape out the door), then all 3 girls squeal and run to the door. It's a big race to see who gets their first to answer it. Mya or Winter rip the door open and Addie runs over, naked, because we are STILL potty training. Then Angus crawls over as fast as his little chubby legs can go and hopefully manages not to get trampled by the big loud barking dogs. Add a flame in the toaster oven and you've got pure chaos. 

Later that day, Winter wanted the leftover chicken Dan made for the camping trip. She's such a meat eater. She didn't even care if it was heated up as long as she could eat it off of the bone. So she went to town on her chicken, and I went upstairs to do some laundry. Ugh laundry. All the time, for the rest of my life, laundry. Sorry, where was I? So I put a load in, came back downstairs and saw an empty plate on the table. Otter was licking the floor next to the table... not good. There were chicken bones in that chicken. And Winter never puts her plate in the sink like she's supposed to... ever.

Oh man, panic mode again. Otter ate chicken bones. I started to look for my phone to call Dan (cuz I never know where it is) and then I spotted a pile of puke... chicken bone puke on the floor by the table. I've never been more relieved to see dog puke in my life. It looked like a good amount of chicken bones in the puke so I assumed Otter didn't have any in her intestines. I watched her closely for a couple of days and she's been fine since... She could have totally choked to death and died. Another close one.