Yesterday started off just like any other day does around here – woke up, showered, got dressed, got kids dressed. Fed kids, chugged a coffee and made Julia’s lunch. Throughout all of this I had to repeatedly drop what I was doing to dash into the living room and keep Oliver from ripping ornaments off the tree and send it crashing to the ground. After he’d snapped the hands off of two British guardsmen and had picked the sequins off the ornament Julia made at preschool last year, I announced (loudly) that since Oliver was unable to keep his (bloody) hands off of the (goddamn) tree it would have to come down and was downright shocked when my threats were met with rousing choruses of “Yay! Let’s take the tree down! Right now!” and “Okay! I’ll help you, Mummy!”

I then had to fight with them to not yank the tree down right then and there and distracted them from tree destruction with the chocolates from their advent calendars.

Finally it was time to leave to take Julia to school, thank the sweet baby Jesus. Spent a good ten minutes bundling everyone up in their winter wear, herded the kids into their car seats, started the van and spent another good ten minutes scraping the frost off the windows with my debit card, because so the fuck what if I live in The Great White North? Snowbrushes and scrapers are for weenies. Weenies!

We don’t have much snow but it’s been really, really cold out and yesterday was no exception. When we got home Oliver made a beeline for his toy garage and box of dinky cars and I made a beeline for the thermostat. Earlier this fall Dave and I had a gas fireplace installed in our den – the kind that looks like a wood burning stove but isn’t – and it heats this place up in no time flat. Within a few minutes we were both thawing.

I was in the kitchen putting dishes away when all of a sudden I caught whiff of burning hair. It’s a stench that’s unmistakable; I instantly knew that hair was burning and had a small heart attack as I practically threw myself over the breakfast bar to make sure Oliver wasn’t on fire in the den below. He wasn’t, he was happily playing cars, but the stench was getting stronger.

And then it hit me: Chewy. My hairy, hairy cat:

I bolted for the den, rounded the end of the couch and found Chewy stretched out on the tile beside the fireplace, asleep, while the hair on his tail was being singed off. I had to cut tufts of blackened hair off his tail after I’d made sure he wasn’t going to like, burst into flames.

So, yesterday’s highlights, to recap:

• threatened idly to take down the tree and then had to fight with my children to keep said tree up

• scraped the frost off my car with my debit card like a true hoser…

•  …only to come home and get the shit scared out of me because my cat! was practically on fire!

Never a dull moment. EVER.

(While I am making light of this, I recognize that the potential for it to have been worse is there. Our newest house rule is that the den fireplace can only be on when we are on the main floor and only when we are home. Oh, yeah, and we’ll, you know, keep the cat away from it.)

*New review up over at Mama Says…check out what toy had me wondering if we had a family of squirrels living in our walls.

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