Start as you mean to go on..

..Fuck I hope not!

I'll set the scene for you.

It's a wet, windy and stupidly cold August Monday morning.
Last night was bad. All 4 kids woke more then once each which is not the norm, so I'm mega tired.
I have a migraine. The kind that makes you feel you as if you have been hit by a train.
I can barely open my eyes through the pain, and when I do all I can see are coloured spots, like someone has been taking flash photography.

Drew leaves for the Doctor's surgery to have his stitches removed before going in to work.
I reluctantly pull myself from my bed and throw on some clothes. As I begin to walk down the stairs, the following happens.

CRASH...BANG...THUD... SMASH

I feel disorientated as I hear the screaming coming from the kitchen.

I run to the living room and am greeting my my 6 year old. She's wet. She's shouting above her sisters' cries.

I make my way past her to the kitchen. The scene that greets me is chaotic. The 5 and 3 year olds are standing there shouting and screaming and crying.. They are both wet too.

I carefully lift them over the carnage that once resembled my kitchen. They are both shaken, but unhurt.

The floor resembles the shallow end of a swimming pool, but it is not water across the floor, it is oil.

It seems that the numerous tellings off and trips to the naughty step for the 6 year old have not paid off.

She decided to climb on top of the the chest freezer, using my washing basket (full to over flowing with last weeks dirty holiday clothes) as a step and then to stop herself from falling back down, she heaved herself up on the steel utility shelving above which housed the following items:

A set of 3 Le Creuset pans, a 6L slow cooker, 2 measuring jugs, AND a deep fat fryer.

The full basket of clothes have had to be thrown out. They were drenched in oil. They are gone.

My wash basket. Destroyed.

The utility shelves, gone, along with some of the plaster from the wall.

The fryer is still in pieces, yet to be considered salvageable or not.

Luckily the pans survived, although one of their lids didn't.

The slow cooker is OK

The jugs. Gone.

The kitchen floor will be OK. However, for now it will be used as an ice rink as I just cannot get the greasiness off.

The beige living room carpet is another right off. There are now 4 sets of oily foot prints clearly visible making their way from the kitchen.

To say that I am angry would be the understatement of the decade. The amount of money it is going to cost us to put this mess right is immense.

It has taken me 4 hours to clean it up and it is still not 100% finished. I have used 6 whole rolls of kitchen towel half a bottle of washing up liquid and a full bottle of bleach to try and remove the greasy feeling from the vinyl, with little success.

Don't get me wrong, I am relieved that none of the children were injured, really I am.

But I am ready to kill today.. In fact I don't know how I have managed to control myself.

My chest is hurting, I have cried and my migraine isn't any better, but I've had to cope and carry on.

I needed to write this blog to get it off of my chest so that I don't take it out on the kids.

Any tips for the floor would be very much appreciated!!!