Thanksgiving Countdown... Day 4

So the background to today's countdown might seem silly, but it really did get me thinking. You see, I was finishing up the harvest of our garden this year by making jalapeno jelly this morning with my overabundance of jalapenos and red bell peppers (they were they only things that really produced this year besides tomatoes). Needless to say, I ought to have waited until naptime to do it. All it took was me to turn my back for 2 seconds (yes, I know, "2 seconds is too long"!) and voila... I had sugary jalapeno mixture bubbling over onto my stove. Well, I quick whisked up the pot... and...

my stove caught on fire. 

Yes, that's right. I didn't think it was possible for your stove to catch on fire if you don't have a gas stove. I was mistaken. I'm only sorry that I don't have a picture to prove it. But ask Liam, he will tell you. At least I know that both smoke alarms in our house are functioning. :)

 (The nice orange-hued ring around scalded black sugar after I put out the flames... Ring of Fire takes on a whole new meaning for me now :)

So instead of blogging about my first canning success... I'm blogging about my first canning failure. I told Joel that there goes my canning abilities, and we better get another freezer for next year's produce. He just smiled.

But back to my Thanksgiving Countdown...

I'm thankful for lessons learned in the safety of God's hands.

You see, even though my batch of jalapeno jelly went down the drain (quite literally!), I was able to use this as an example to my toddler of fire drills, and understanding what it means when Mommy says hot! Even though I knew our house wasn't going to burn down (thank God!), I was able to get him to understand that if he ever sees a fire in our house, or hears the "beep beep" of the fire alarm, he is supposed to find me and we are supposed to go outside together. We walked through it together and hopefully he'll remember if the time would come for us to practice something like that in real life.

Sometimes life's lessons can be a lot more brutal, especially if we are ignoring God's warnings along the way, but I'm grateful for the little ones that still get the message across without any real negative side effects. And even in the big ones, we can still rejoice.

So I'm thankful for today's stove fire and what it taught my son. It even made me joyful as I scrubbed my stove for over an hour (quite literally!) as I tried to clean off the burnt sugar. :)