Warning: mixing housekeeping and oldnavyweekly.com may be hazardous to your health!

Today the boys and I enjoyed a wonderful picnic lunch outside on our lawn. The warm sunlight shined down on us - but not too bright because there were some clouds. We ate crackers, fruit snacks and granola bars - all foods that we only eat on special occasions. Hunter rode his tricycle and drew with chalk. Grant rolled around, drooled and practiced sitting up (he's getting better - about 20 seconds before face planting into the blanket). However the circumstances that lead to this idyllic moment were not so wonderful.

Rewind to over a year ago when something boiled over in our oven. And then, maybe a month or so later it happened again. Repeat about a dozen times and you get what our oven looked like as of last night. At the beginning of the week I snagged a great deal on Easy Off at Walgreens, so about 9pm last night I decided to spray down our oven and let it sit over night and then clean it out in the morning. This was also ideal timing because we are going out to eat tonight at Red Robin (bottomless fries - yum!). My Aunt and Uncle for whom we babysat a couple weeks ago gave us a gift card as a thank you. We are really excited for our first meal out in months. But, back to the oven...I sprayed it down and then went on finishing up the rest of the things that needed to get done yesterday.

Included on this list was coupon hunting on OldNavyWeekly.com. If you haven't heard of this site and all of it's craziness, allow me to fill you in. Every Friday coupons are hidden on the site and you have to click around to find them. They've been doing this for quite a few weeks now, but this week the $75 of $100 purchase ones were back and I was determined to find it. Lately the coupons have been resetting around 3am EST, or 1am here in Utah. The coupons reset around 1am and Fred and I began clicking like mad. We ended up finding the $75 off one right after it ran out (they only make 1,000 of those available). But, we did snag a $50 off one, huzzah! This was around 1:30am. We then headed to bed and fell asleep around 2am only to be awoken by Hunter around 6:30am.

I am not, nor will ever be, a morning person - especially when I only have 4 1/2 hours of sleep behind me. So, I've been a little off today. And that leads me back to my oven. Of course the excitement of coupon hunting and lack of sleep has lead me to forget all about the toxic chemicals lining the walls of my oven. I decide that rather than microwave the panko/walnut crusted chicken leftovers that we were going to have for lunch, I would re-heat them in the oven so that they'd re-crisp (I hate re-heating food in microwaves). After the oven beeps at the end of preheating, I go to put the chicken in and see white smoke streaming out the oven. At this point my mistake is painfully obvious. I turn off the oven, open the back door and grab the floor fan to blow the smoke out the back door. This helped, but it didn't take long the toxic smoke drifted into the rest of the house. I opened every window and door that I could, which isn't many because our house is old and most of the windows just don't open anymore. Since it was lunch time, I opened the pantry, grabbed some snacks, blanket and toys and hurried the kids outside. And that leads us back to the idyllic picnic scene. We were outside for about an hour and a half, which was enough time for our house to clear out.

We did have such a good time outside that I decided that we'd make picnic lunches a regular event this summer. Hunter thought it was about the coolest thing ever - partially because I relaxed our eating habits and let him eat all his favorite snacks. It was refreshing for me too. When you're a SAHM anything outside the normal routine is refreshing and invigorating. Kids love when you change things up too, unfortunately I don't do it very often. But, we will be eating meals outside a lot this summer, but next time we won't be chased out of our house by toxic smoke (hopefully).