Of Little Boys and Golf Balls

It all started calmly enough.  It always starts calmly.  Michael took the car to get an oil change and car wash, taking the three older kids with him (they get to shoot the car with colored soap - the apparent highlight of their lives).  So Sam and I hung out at home.  I started to make dinner and every time I turned around Sam was playing with the oven.  My oven is a gas range that is set up a little different.  The little door on the bottom doesn't open into a drawer but is instead the broiler.  Sam kept popping this open and I kept pulling him away telling him it was hot.  No big deal.  Just another day around here.

So I mixed the cornbread, turned the oven on and slid the cornbread in.  Doobeedoobeedoo.  Life is calm.  It's so refreshing to only have one kid to deal with.  The temp on the oven continued to climb.  It hit about 285 degrees and then it wasn't so calm.  I heard a series of muffled explosions come from the lower part of the oven.  Then gray smoke started to billow out and the whole house was filled with the smell of burning rubber.  I opened the window and just waited.  Something had just exploded in my oven and I wasn't in a hurry to open it.  I didn't want anything to explode in my face.  After a couple minutes I felt brave enough to open the broiler door.  This is what I saw, spread all over the bottom of the oven:

In case you can't tell, it is (or was) a golf ball.  While Sam was playing with the broiler he slipped a golf ball in and I didn't notice.  I scraped the mess out of the oven, kind of laughing and cursing at the same time, and turned the oven back on.  The house once again began to reek of burning rubber.  So I turned off the oven and saw this mess:

I didn't know there was so much to a golf ball.  It seems that during the initial explosion part of the mess stuck to the top of the broiler compartment and as the oven heated up it melted and fell down.  You haven't lived until you get to scrape spaghetti noodles of rubber out of your stove.

As I write this it has been three days since the incident and each and every time I turn the oven on more rubber appears from somewhere.  I'm not sure my oven is ever going to recover.