Too Close For Comfort

Saturday morning we went to the pool. We stayed a little less than two hours and then came home to put the little girls down for their naps. When I opened the front door upon our arrival home, I was hit by a strange smell. In truth, the smell itself wasn't as strange as the fact that we were smelling it in our home. It smelled like sweet meat on the grill, like mesquite barbecue chicken or something. Michael initially agreed that the smell was like some food on the grill, but then he proclaimed, "It's wood. Something's burning!"

I didn't know if I should run upstairs or down. I quickly raced thought through my actions of the morning; I hadn't used an iron or curing iron--or even hair dryer (I was headed for the pool, for Pete's sakes). Then I thought of Mason's toad's heat lamp and ran upstairs to his room.

There it was. The heat lamp was sitting on top of Mason's dresser, not above Fireball's cage. It was smoking! I picked it up and saw the damage:


Apparently, before we went to the pool, Mason had Fireball out for his sisters to take turns holding her. They made sure to tell us that they had all washed their hands thoroughly after holding the toad. Fabulous! Too bad no one remembered to put the heat lamp back above the cage and not on the wood dresser! We could have lost our house, but at least our kids had clean hands...

Needless to say, since Fireball doesn't even seem to like going under the heat lamp (we've never seen her hang out on that side of her habitat) we took away the blasted thing.

I'm just glad we didn't stay at the pool any longer! I don't even like to think about losing things like baby mementos and photographs and whatnot. That would soooo not have been good.