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Since the nights are turning chilly I decided it would be a good time to make a big pot of chili. Yesterday I went out to the deep freeze in our garage to pull out a pound of ground turkey. Imagine my horror as I open the door and realize it doesn’t feel cold and smells like strawberries. Everything was essentially thawed in our deep freeze. The strawberries to make smoothies has turned into a sticky mess (the bag had a small hole in the corner where juice dripped from the top shelf all the way to the bottom). A whole roasting chicken, 2 pounds of ground turkey, sausages, ice cream, orange juice, ALL THAWED. The worst was looking at the bottom shelf and seeing that bags and bags of breast milk that were now ruined. I did not want to think about it. There was a brief moment where I thought about throwing everything into garbage bags to just be done with it. 

I guess the one good thing was I found it all while it was still cool and not room temperature. Thank goodness Fauxma Dee was around to watch the twins while I ran to the store to get supplies to make use of the meat.

Huge pot of chili

Roasted chicken for pot pies

Making chicken pot pies

Preparing the gravy for pot pies

While I was cooking the twins wanted to keep me company so I dragged a high chair into the kitchen for their (my) entertainment.

Some may have noticed that Derby’s helmet is now a very stark white. The paint was chipping off his super cool Star Wars paint job. I found paint chips in Derby’s bed and on Loen’s face…hence the removal.

The twins playing on Daddy while I finish dinner

I knew I had to get rid of the breast milk so I dragged it into the house, sticky with strawberry juice and got ready to pour it all down the drain. I felt a little nauseous as I cut open the bags and saw the dates. Christmas morning 3am 2007, Thanksgiving 2007 5pm, New Year’s Day noon, down the drain. All of my time hovering over the breast pump, in the pumping room at the NICU and the back office on the trauma floor was for naught. The one consoling thought was it has been a year and the kids have had breast milk all this time. I am still pumping and will have to bump up the schedule from 3 times a day to 4 or 5. A few formula bottles wont kill them. Sigh…

Epilogue: It gets even better. Last week we tried out the convection oven for the first time, it tripped the breaker. We tried it again just in case it was a fluke, same result. The electrician came last night to see if the problem was the actual range or with the wiring. In the process he dealt with the fact that 90% of the breaker box was labeled incorrectly. To address that problem we turned on all the lights in the house and took note of which ones went off when the breaker was flipped. Not the most fun at 5 pm when you want to finish cooking dinner. This morning I noticed the fountain in the backyard wasn’t on and mentioned it to Tadd. When he came home he went to see if the backyard breaker wasn’t turned back on. He was having trouble figuring out what was wrong. I went upstairs to put Derby to bed when I hear “I found it”. Turns out the GFCI that connects the garage and backyard had to be reset. Guess what was plugged in the garage? Our small chest freezer that I had plugged in after the big one petered out. So the chili that we froze for another night was ruined! I’m just grateful that I was too tired to finish the pot pies last night or else they would have been in the freezer too, then I would have been really upset. What is it with me and freezers this week?!