A broken bowl

The good news is my kitchen floor is (now) freshly mopped.

The bad news is that I only mopped it because Benjamin dropped a hot bowl of potato soup while he was getting it out of the microwave.

The explosion was loud and scary. 

Shards of glass went flying from one side of the kitchen clear to the other (and skittered into the dining room...and even made it onto the counter and the tops of the dishes drying in the top rack of the dishwasher, which we thought was particularly impressive). The soup splattered a bit, but its spray radius was nothing compared to how the glass scattered.

I yelled at the kids to stay exactly where they were in such a commanding way that they actually listened. All of them. No one moved a muscle. 

I carefully picked my way out of the kitchen, put on my shoes, and then evacuated Alexander and Zoë from the area—one was by the sink and the other by the island near the back door. Phoebe was already sitting in her chair, but she, too, didn't move a muscle. 

"Can I go?" Benjamin asked, on the verge of tears.

"You can go," I said. "Just be careful you don't step on any glass..."

He ran upstairs to release some adrenaline, I tossed the kids some crackers and oranges (instead of making them the lunch we'd been planning on) and then got to work cleaning up the floor (though I did eventually also warm up some leftover macaroni and cheese for them). 

Miriam came upstairs to see what all the commotion was and volunteered to help me clean up the mess. I was very glad she did because, as I said, we found glass shards all over the place!

Benjamin felt awful, even though no one was mad...but just because sometimes these things make you feel awful anyway. 

"Was it an all-white bowl?" Andrew asked. "Or one with blue trim?"

"It was a blue trim one," I told him.

"Well, good!"

Andrew has this weird thing with secondhand things. We actually have his parents' set of dishes (the all-white ones) that Andrew feels he grew up using. Those are okay to use.

We took them with us when we moved out of the Spanish Fork house. Grandpa kept the set with the blue trim. Andrew swears his parents got that set after he'd left the house. I can't really answer to that. But I will tell you that Andrew is perfectly comfortable using the white dishes yet refuses to use the dishes with the blue stripe (which Grandpa gave to us when he married Darla). 

Andrew explained it's because they're "used" dishes. 

It makes no sense.

But he was happy it was at least a blue-trimmed bowl that bit the dust. 

*****

To help Benjamin feel better we told a few stories of breaking glass things. It's happened to a lot of people throughout history, so Benjamin is in very good company, but here are a few of our favourite stories...

Once Grandpa dropped some salsa on the cement floor of the basement and convinced Andrew that he had saved our lives because there was glass in the salsa. Andrew ate it up (not the salsa—the story) and hailed his father a hero.

Once I broke a measuring cup (right around voting season—seriously! Go vote, guys!) and we ordered some replacement measuring cups...which arrived 100% shattered.

Then there was this other time that a measuring cup jumped out of the cupboard in our Cairo apartment, hit Andrew in the face, and shattered on the tile floor...which was perhaps a little bit my fault.

There's this story of Benjamin breaking a glass in the Spanish Fork house (which I didn't remember but which nevertheless must be true).

And this story about Andrew breaking 50% of our glasses in the Durham house (which includes a bonus story of Benjamin breaking another glass...and links to a post about him breaking a not-glass bowl).

After our basement flooded last year we were busy moving everything around (every night it felt like) and Miriam dropped an entire box of glass bottles on the cement floor.

We broke several panes of glass while we were redoing our windows at the beginning of the pandemic.

And don't forget that on the morning of Grandpa and Darla's wedding, Grandpa smashed a water jug on our driveway.

There are more stories about broken glass on this blog as well. I'm beginning to wonder if we spend an absurd amount of time cleaning up broken glass or if this is about average...

Oh, and one of my favourite stories—about Corelle ware, too! (which today's dish was)—is of Grandma Torrie (who wasn't my grandma, but who was my cousin's grandma and I often saw her when I would go to the farm to visit my cousins). Anyway, she was shopping in Lethbridge (the city!) and there was a display of Correlle ware on one of the aisle ends with a big sign touting that they were "SHATTERPROOF!" 

So Grandma Torrie grabbed a box of Corelle dishes...and threw it on the floor!

As the picture of Benjamin's mess indicates, those Corelle dishes are not, in fact, shatterproof. Grandma Torrie found that out, too! She was not impressed with the quality of those dishes. 

If that last story is not true (and it might not be), it is at least true that it was Grandma Torrie who told it to me (she could have been joking about it; I wasn't very good at picking up on things like that when I was 10). Whatever the case, the scene of Grandma Torrie throwing an entire box of Corell dinnerware on the ground has lived rent-free in my brain for the past thirty years.

It's been good company, reminding me to always mean what I say!