A Biscuit & An Egg

Last week, two little, tiny, usually-insignificant objects ruled our household for 24 hours, and I'm not talking about my Mice. They are little, tiny, but extraordinarily significant. I'm talking about a biscuit and an egg. My biscuit recipe calls for one egg. One. For an entire recipe of biscuit dough, it takes one egg.

It was past Mouse-feeding-time, so when the dough was mixed - Sunny had "dumped" the ingredients; Miss Mouse was the "stirring expert" - I allowed both of them to sample it. I indulged myself, as well, congratulating myself on supposedly sneaking more than they realized I had eaten. I'm guessing they saw through my sneakiness....they're perceptive little creatures.

The hotdish created with the biscuit dough was less than savory. Neither Mouse would touch it. Thank goodness. I had an extra helping for them, but I didn't finish the "extra" of the second helping. Something just wasn't sitting right.

I gave us all some chewable papaya to help our stomachs after supper. Usually that helps all of us, if I have the right brand of the stuff on hand.

Around about midnight, I was still prowling the house, anxious as a housecat near a sprinkler. I just did not feel right, well, healthy. And at 12:45, my body let me know that it was indeed not healthy, happy, or proud of my raw-egg-biscuit-dough-indulgence. And it let me know again. And again. And again.

At one point, the world got all dark and sparkly, and I passed out. My Knight in Shining Armor arrived just in time...almost. The poor guy spent his night comforting Sunny Baby Mouse, who wanted only her momma. As soon as he would get her back to sleep, he would run to check on me since I was spending the night on the bathroom floor for convenience's sake. By that time, Sunny would usually be awake again screaming for me, so back to her he would run. It was quite a night, and he earned years' worth of brownie points.

By 6 a.m., Sunny and Mr. T were both asleep. My 5 a.m. experiment with keeping water down had failed spectacularly by that point, so it was with dismay, though not surprise, that I heard Miss Mouse shout her need for assistance. Her body did not appreciate the egg, either, apparently.

Sunny Baby Mouse lasted until around 10 a.m. before she started ridding herself of the previous night's "treat".

Mr. T had called in to take work off - perhaps for the first time in years, at least for a reason like this - to take care of us. He was stocking up brownie points at a shocking speed.

What is amazing about this whole, disgusting, stinky story is how thankful I was in the midst of it.

You see, we were puking on Thursday. The previous Thursday our washing machine had quit. I had called an appliance store, failed at talking to the computerized system, and been transferred to a call center somewhere to schedule an appointment for it to be fixed. We were scheduled for Saturday, but on Saturday, the call center let me know that the repairman was too busy to come. He would be out on Thursday, meaning it would have been an entire week before we could even know what to do with our washing machine. Needless to say, I checked around and found someone else who could come on Tuesday. He showed up as scheduled on Tuesday and told us the poor machine was beyond repair. Desperate for clean clothes, the Mice and I trekked to a local appliance store (and by "local", I mean actually owned and operated locally - no call centers involved) and purchased a washing machine on Wednesday afternoon; we were put on the schedule for delivery of our new machine for Thursday morning at 9 a.m.

By Thursday morning, I had several loads of food poisoning casualties to go into the newly-installed machine. I am thankful beyond words that we were not back at the point of diagnosing the old machine that morning rather than getting the new one installed! What better way to break in the new machine than to get food poisoning??

Miss Mouse has been 'instructing' her younger sibling about eating raw eggs this week. After mixing up cookies yesterday, Sunny Baby Mouse thought we should sample the dough, as we have in the past. I silently lamented with her over not sampling the fresh, almond-scented mound in front of me. But, keeping us both in line was Miss Mouse who explained, "No, Sunny, we don't want to eat raw eggs because we would get poison again". This explanation led Sunny to nod her head and say "Noooo. Puke. No."

Apparently we have all learned our lessons. And we are all four of us very thankful for that beautiful new washing machine.