They all piled up in our dining and living rooms, so that we had one tiny, snaking path that went through the jumble of stuff. We had to clean out and move the chest freezer, and when we moved the fridge to the dining room we had to tie it together so that our slanting floor and gravity wouldn't pull the door open, spilling the contents across the room.
That wasn't the only reason we had to tie the fridge together. WildGirl LOVES to get into stuff she shouldn't. She has severe autism and a hellish determination that combine to make her the most fearsome troublemaker in the history of troublesome children.
We pretty much had to construct a gate similar to the Great Wall of China to keep her out of the kitchen in the first place, where she could have experimented with ovens and freezers and generally gotten herself killed in so many ways it'd take a whole blog just to list them all. So, over the years, we've been storing the stuff she couldn't have in the kitchen, protected by the Great Gate. Without the protection of the Great Gate, stuff started happening.
WildGirl started finding juice in the piles of stuff and drinking some, pouring the rest down the sink.
She found WildBoy's epi-pens and hid them.
She stole all the spoons and laid them out on the floor.
She scattered food, destroyed papers, ate a couple styrofoam cups, and dumped out containers full of random crap that we stored in the kitchen for sorting later.
We had no access to a kitchen sink, so we had to wash dishes upstairs in the bathtub, which was a pain in the arse. WildGirl would frequently steal said dishes and play with them. I started buying paper and styrofoam dishes, frankly just not wanting to deal with it.
We also had to eat out a lot, not having access to freezers, refrigerators, or a stove. It got so bad the smell of greasy fast food would send me into a rage (we have roughly 5 fast food joints in our dinky little town, plus one take out Chinese place). I missed eating something other than cheeseburgers. The children, however, never tired of MacDonalds. Of course.
After our haphazard attempts to fix things, I was a little worried. To be fair, I was also struggling with a bout of depression that had me scowling even when things were going ok. And this project was going fairly well considering a horde of barbarians were running the show, but all the same I was worried.
So I talked to VikingDad about it, in a serious heart to heart that went something like this.
Me: I'm kind of worried about the kitchen project.
Him: Why?
Me: Look at all the other house projects you've done.
Him: What about them?
Me: The hole you punched in the wall, the gate, all this stuff you tried to fix looks fucked up. That hole in the wall looks like a lumpy pile of white lava melted down the side of the wall. And the gate scrapes up the wall on the hinge side so it looks like pieces of the house are fleeing in terror. The whole house is falling apart.
Him: .... And your point is?
Me: I want to make sure when you fix the kitchen it actually looks like a real kitchen.
Him: So, you want it to be pretty?
Me: I want it to both look good and be functional, yes. Can you do that?
He gives me a doubtful look.
Me: You're fired. You need to call your dad and see if he'll help us.
And so the rest of the kitchen was fixed with VikingGrandpa's expertise and help, with VikingGrandma and VikingLad helping. I picked out and bought all the things, and the rest of the crew worked on the kitchen while I was busy keeping WildBoy and WildGirl from throwing themselves into the wet mortar. (To be fair, it does look pretty fun to squish between your toes.)
Eventually, the giant, huge, pain-in-the-arse project was completed! (Well, the floor anyway. It took a couple weeks after that to get the cabinets and sink installed.)
And,
And the peasants rejoiced!
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