Fire!!!

We had a close call on Sunday! I made some Janet Rolls (family favorite from from my Aunt Janet!) We usually just make them on Thanksgiving... but the kids talked me into it. I may or may not have bribed them to work on scouting and Duty to God for me to make them... hey whatever works! So, these rolls have a lot of sugar in them and sometimes they overflow in the oven... smokey, stinky mess! I pulled the rolls out and thought... I should clean the oven now because I have cookie dough in the fridge that I want to cook later. (I usually run my oven cleaner at night so i don't have to smell the burn...)

The kids complained all afternoon about the smell... we talked about sitting outside so we don't have to smell the smoke.. but it was about 10 degrees too cold. We were Skyping with my parents when we all heard the "poooof" noise come from the oven. John ran upstairs to get his shoes on so he could go switch the circuit breaker. While he is upstairs I see smoke coming from the cupboard above the oven. We open it and start pulling things out to see where the smoke is coming from. All of a sudden i see a reflection of fire up on the top of the cupboard!!!!! Freak me out!!! I was calm and ran for the fire extinguisher under the kitchen sink. I was praying it still worked. (it has a moving sticker on it, so I know we have had it many years!) Scotty was standing right there so I handed it to him and told him to spray it. He was taller than me! It worked and the fire was gone. I yelled up the stairs and told John we had a fire! We weren't sure if we should still call 911 or not. We decided not... We kept an eye on it to make sure there wasn't anything in the wall on fire. (meanwhile my parents were still on Skype listening to all the excitement. We told them we'd call back, but they wanted to stay on the line!)

There were a few tender mercies that day! Thank heavens I listened to the spirit tell me to turn the cleaner on then and not that night. We would have had a full blown house fire! Our bedroom is directly above the oven and so are the stairs. After the fire, we went to the stairs (it shares a wall with the oven) and the wall was very hot! It would have destroyed the staircase. We have plans to get some of those ladders to drop out the windows.

If we would have gone outside like planned we wouldn't have heard the noise or seen the smoke until it was well on it's way... so blessed!

I've thought of a ton of things I need to get prepared in case we do have a fire or some other disaster.... here are a few I can do right away...

*Need to get all my negatives out of the house. I have 2 binders full of them.
*Back-up all my pics to a DVD or an online service ( i have most of them on Picasa)
*I made a folder with copies of all our certificates, ss cards and stuff and it's sitting upstairs... need to get it out of the house somewhere safe.
*get a rope ladder for each room.

we took the plate off the wire box and it's all black in there!

Scotty reenacting spraying out the fire!

We feel so blessed that it wasn't worse!! We aren't sure if the oven is dead or not... we have a home warranty and the oven repair man came and said an electrician needed to come first. So we hope it's all covered and ok.