My Brother set the Microwave on Fire

I honestly think marriage in general is hard - but marriage while raising a child with Autism ( all special needs) is like living in a war zone always at battle.  I promised myself early on that I would do everything in my power to make my marriage work and one of the ways was a date night most Saturdays.  It actually was such a simple thing in theory but securing a babysitter was the hard part. I always tried to have a “team” of people that watched the kids because grandparents weren’t an option for us.  One Saturday night in the summer when the kids were probably 9 ( Dylan) and 6 ( Anderson) we had plans that we were really looking forward to. For most of the 17 years Dylan lived with us we had no help on the weekends.  I was often up on and off all night with Dylan and usually for good by 4am, 5 on a great day.  I counted down the hours until the sitter showed up to escape and be a human with my husband for a few hours. Most of the time we hadn’t had a conversation all week. I got so excited to dress cute and “date” my husband.

 On this particular Saturday Kevin was in the shower and I was downstairs on Dylan duty. And Dylan was quick and sneaky.  He put an entire bag of chips in the microwave and started it- by the time I noticed what he had done the microwave was legit on fire.  I started screaming for Kevin and I panicked- I opened the door to the microwave and started waving.  This was not a smart thing to do by the way.  The fire spread down the wall behind the microwave and after a lot of screaming and water thrown it eventually went out.  The smell was horrible and it was quite a mess.  We had all the doors in the house open to get the smell out which was challenging because they were normally locked from the inside and our windows were permanently nailed shut so we couldn’t open those. It was fun trying to keep Dylan in the house and simultaneously clean up. Somehow we were able to continue with our scheduled date night and people might think that is crazy that we still went out however we looked at as both kids were fine and we really needed those nights out.

The next morning Kevin took Anderson with him to Home Depot to buy a new microwave and a fire extinguisher.  She told the cashier as sweet as could be “ my brother set our microwave on fire”.

Just a normal day at the Shope house.  No need to look so shocked dear cashier- we got this.