NOW it's funny, but not last night...

My best friends today:

Why would Clorox wipes be my best friends you ask? Let me take you back about 21 hours ago....

It was Honig's 27th birthday on the 20th of this month and he loves getting all the "Free birthday appetizer" emails, they're pretty much the highlight of his birthday and he looks forward to getting them all year long. So last night we decided to go Biaggi's, a nice Italian restaurant, so he could use a birthday freebie there. All is well, we're having fun watching Kara go nuts over the spoon we let her play with, and we're laughing and trying to decide what we're going to do this summer for fun. Midway through dinner my phone rings and I see it's our next door neighbor. I am not one for answering phone calls at the table during dinner at restaurants, I think it's pretty rude, so I just let it go to voicemail and figured I'd just check the message when we were on our way home. So we continue on with dinner and eat their divine chicken goat cheese pizza (heavenly!), and then it's time for dessert. We're looking over the dessert menu and we're about to decide when Kara starts to get crabby and is not amused by her spoon anymore. Here's how the conversation went:

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honig: "Grab her bottle. She's hungry. It's in the diaper bag."

chelle: "No it's not. Didn't you grab it?"

honig: "No, I thought you did."

chelle: "No, you were the one warming it on the stove. FREAK! IS IT STILL ON THE STOVE???? PLEASE TELL ME YOU TURNED THE STOVE OFF!!!!!"

(I'm about to have a coronary because I'm picturing our entire house burned to the ground and is just a pile of smoldering cinders at this point)

honig: "No, I thought you turned it off. I'm sorry, I'm sorry! What should we do? Do you want to get dessert to go?"

(At that point I about grab the butter knife and impale him in the heart because I can't believe he's concerned with whether or not we're going to get dessert because I'm positive we're going to be able to see a towering funnel of smoke from our house all the way across town when we step outside of Biaggi's to go home.)

chelle: "ARE YOU FREAKING CRAZY? NO WE'RE NOT GETTING DESSERT! WE NEED TO LEAVE NOW!"

honig: "Ok ok, I'm sorry I'm sorry! It was an accident. I thought you got it. I'll go get the van and you pay and I'll pick you up outside."

chelle: "FINE! GO!"

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Our waiter happens to walk by right after Honig left, and I threw my debit card at him and told him I needed him to go take care of our check right this second because we have to leave right away. Then he felt it was his business to know why we needed to leave and I just told him we left our stove on and I needed him to go run our card right now and mr. man decided he needed to ask HOW we knew it was on, so the not so nice side of chelle came out because I needed to get out of there immediately and I didn't want to play 20 questions with him so I told him it's not his concern and it doesn't matter but I needed him to go process my bill right now. At least that got results. So as soon as he came back with my card and I scratched a signature on the ticket, I all but ran through the restaurant and out the front doors to get in the van.

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I'm not going to lie, the drive home was a bit of a tense one because I was pretty angry Honig had left the bottle on the stove and we had been gone over an hour by this point. He called our friend Jeff that lives 2 buildings down and had him break into our house through our front windows to see if anything was on fire and to see what was going on. Jeff called us back when we were about 5 minutes away from home and said there was nothing but ashes in the pan and our house was filled with smoke and all of our smoke detectors were going off. Great, just great. So we pull up infront of our house and all but jump out of the van and I can smell the burning all the way from the street. Thankfully Jeff had opened up all the windows to let it start to air out but holy cow, it stunk to high heaven. Kara and I were in there maybe 30 seconds because I wanted to see the "damage" and then I grabbed her and told honig the smell was just too bad and that Kara shouldn't be around that. So I had to go to WalMart to buy more bottles, and just kill time. I ended up back at home in the back parking lot feeding Kara in the back seat of the van and watching The Office on the dvd player in the van. Honig came out and we both agreed that it was way too strong of a smell for Kara to sleep there so Kara and I ended up sleeping on our air mattress in the front room at our neighbors house who are moving in a couple of days. I slept maybe 2 hours the entire night because Kara tosses her head from side to side so much while she sleeps that it wakes me up everytime she does it, and then she decided since she wasn't in her crib that she wanted to wake up at 3AM to eat which she never ever does. I fed her and got her back to sleep and I just took cat naps where I could inbetween her thrashing her head around. We are still too paranoid of parents to leave our baby with someone for long periods of time, yeah yeah I know we need to get out for a date as just honig and I and blah blah blah, I've heard the lecture and we'll do it when we're good and ready, so I stayed over there with her because we weren't comfortable with leaving her in our neighbors front room on an air mattress when our neighbor was asleep upstairs and wouldn't hear Kara if she was crying or rolled over and we also didn't like the option of me going home to clean our house 4 doors down while having our neighbors back door unlocked with our baby asleep in their front room. Not kosher with me. So honig was a stellar husband and stayed up until 2AM cleaning and vacuuming over and over to try to get the smell out of some stuff. And then he got up at 5:30 AM to vacuum upstairs since he didn't want to wake up our neighbors by vacuuming right next to their room in the middle of the night.

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Our neighbors said our smoke alarms had been going off for over 45 minutes by the time we got home and there is a fine layer of ash all over EVERYTHING in our house that was exposed. And we also have to wash all of our clothes and blankets because the smell permeated into all fabric. So now our house has a faint smell of polycarbonate from the bottle, silicone from the nipple, burned breastmilk, and charred teflon from the pan but at least it's no where near as bad as last night. We've had fans going nonstop since we got home last night.

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So THAT'S why Clorox wipes are my best friends today.