Orange Juice and Grass

I am a clutsy person.

I know. Those of you who know me are saying to yourselves, "Whaaa? April, a clutz? I had no idea!"

It's not possible, I know. My whole life I've found the old adage, "Tuesday's child is full of grace," to be quite ironic.

In the last two days I've had two incidents. I find it truly amazing that I have not subjected Olivia to any major harm since she's been born. I'm sure that God assigned an extra portion of angels to watch over that little girl: not because of herself, but because of her close proximity to me.

The first accident was a result of our fridge breaking down. We ended up losing four gallons of milk (they kept curdling) and numerous other freezer and fridge items. We called the fixit man on Friday, who couldn't come until Monday. He then had to order a part and can't fix the fridge until this Friday. He told us that we could get our fridge going until he came back if we turned it off and let it defrost.

In the midst of this fiasco I ended up driving our frozen meat to our in-laws' freezer; putting any unspoiled cold things in our cooler, filling it with ice, and leaving it in our open garage for two days; dealing with a fridge that leaked all this water all over the floor when it defrosted; and more.

It seemed like I was never going to get an opportunity to clean the fridge, which I was excited to do since it was completely empty. I finally got to work on it during Olivia's non-nap. (She non-naps now, did you know? Some days she just sits in her pen crib and talks and sings and pulls on the bars for 2 hours. If hearing that for 2 hours does not fray one's last nerve, I do not know what does.)

I was rushing, trying to complete the job before I had to get Olivia. Since hearing her fooling around like that drives me crazy, I listened to my iPod while I washed. And apparently listening to music impedes one's sense of hearing, as I did not hear, therefore did not realize, that one of the shelves sitting on the counter had started to fall, crashing the orange juice container (which wasn't in the fridge! argh!) to the floor. OJ everywhere. All over the cupboards, all over the rug, floor, me, everywhere. So I had to stop cleaning the fridge to manage that mess.

It turns out that the OJ ran under the stove, and upon pulling out the stove's drawer, I discovered the oven's grody underbelly. It was about a 1/2" pile of red fibers from our old red rugs, interwoven with white Lucy hairs. So really it was more like a 1/2" gray carpet.

Yum.

Now I had to spend my fridge-cleaning time on operation "oven underbelly." The fridge eventually got cleaned. So did my jeans and the kitchen floor and the cupboards...

Yesterday I actually caused bodily harm to myself while I was working in the yard. Olivia loves playing in the yard. She  mostly wanders around, leans over to pretend to smell the dead flowers from last year (she leans over, sniffs, and goes, "mmmmm!!!"), pats the tree, etc. Since she is so happy in the yard, I decided to do some pruning of said dead flowers, etc.

I couldn't find our actual yard clippers, so I was using this really crappy pair of "grass" cutters to cut our ornamental grass down. Apparently the grass cutters are for trimming simple lawn grass blades. I was desperately trying to snip the thick grass stalks in one hand, and pull away the clipped grass with the other. I guess I grabbed a clump that was not successfully cut, so when I forcefully yanked at it, the grass stayed put, and my finger somehow, in sliding along the blades, suffered a huge gash.

And that my friends, is how you cut your hand open using only grass.

It was one of those cuts that is so deep that it doesn't bleed right away. Then it started oozing out of my  hand. I couldn't just run in to take care of it because I didn't want to leave O in the yard alone. So I had to snatch her up in one hand while cupping a hand of blood in the other. Then I saw her beautiful blue and white polka dot hat laying on the ground (that girl loves wearing her hats!). I couldn't leave that out there!

To make a longer story shorter, I somehow managed to get the dog in the house (sans gate to keep her in the yard), the child, and the hat. I had to to this all without letting on that there was a problem, or else O might become upset and hinder my bandaging efforts. At one point I was trying to turn on the TV to pacify her and blood was running through my fingers onto the back of my hand. It was about to splash onto the floor, which would have caught her interest and caused even more problems as she tried to play with it.

I eventually got the mischief managed, thanks to Neosporin and a big Spiderman bandaid.

And now I'm leary about what today will bring. Don't things always happen in threes? I'm about to unload the dishwasher and mop the kitchen floor. Wish me luck...