Bucket, Shark, and Bill

This is our bucket. Rather, it was our bucket. It has been forever banished from our household...

Two weekends ago was another crazy Saturday. I stayed up until 2 am Friday night shopping and baking for a fondue party for 6 adults to be held Saturday night. Then I had to wake up very early on Saturday morning for a swap-the-kids temple trip with Tyce and Faith.

Our car, as I've posted, hasn't been in great shape lately. The radiator kept doing its best impression of Old Faithful, so there was antifreeze all over our garage floor and I had to continually fill the radiator. And that's what I was doing that Saturday morning. I mixed the antifreeze in the red bucket and filled the radiator. That way we'd be able to make the trip to Chicago without overheating.

However, I had some fluid left. So I hid the bucket and made the kids promise they wouldn't touch it. After all, antifreeze is liquid death.

I fully intended to put the remainder of the antifreeze in the radiator when we got home...but I forgot to with the dinner preparations I had to take care of.

Fast forwarding past dinner (which was delicious), we started playing a few rounds of Coloretto. Carter decided to show the pantry (our garage) to his two friends. We didn't think about them for a few minutes. Somewhere between 2 - 10 minutes. And when someone went to check on them...

they were covered in antifreeze and were talking about drinking it.

I've never thrown a party before that ended in the emergency room.

We called poison control to be safe and they made us take all three kids (one from each family present at the party) to the emergency room. We were there three hours waiting for results of the blood test. Carter was a trooper and despite being scared of the hospital bed, didn't even cry when his blood was being drawn. That's even more amazing given that the tech who drew blood sounded like he'd never spoken with a child before. "Ok, we're gonna stick this huge needle in your arm and pull out a buncha blood. But don't be scared, because it will only hurt like the dickens for a few minutes! I'll get a nurse to force your arm still during the excruciating pain. Ready, buddy?"

We weren't worried about the whole mess because the kids seemed fine and we really didn't think that they drank any antifreeze. The results confirmed that all three children were fine. The other two couples are on medicaid so I'm glad that they didn't have to lose their life savings over a fondue dinner. We had to pay, but it wasn't as bad as I had expected.

One of the two couples was at our house for the first time that night - no word yet on if they'll come back...

The car is now fixed ($260 for a water pump), I threw that bucket away so it wouldn't remind me of the incident, and Carter has mostly stayed out of trouble since; that may be a record.

Carter was given a shark beanie baby at the hospital by one of the nurses. Given that the $360 bill was pulled from our HSA today, I now consider that shark to be the most expensive toy we own. I'm looking for an appropriate name to give to that stupid shark; something expensive and possibly sinister sounding. Comment if you've got any good ones.