We've had an interesting week here in the Wachdorf home. The kind of week your insurance company is not too happy to hear about. Health insurance. Car insurance. Take your pick. We are breaking everyone's statistical risk models this week. It started with Kate.

Saturday before last, Dan and I were in the kitchen talking while we were getting dinner ready. This sounds too active, so let me rephrase: We were standing around in the kitchen waiting for some Trader Joe's Mandarin Chicken to heat up in the oven. We were having some idle conversation,and appeared ready to cruise to a somewhat boring but not unpleasant evening at home. Then, the Great Variable that is having a small child took effect. Kate, in a moment that I have replayed in my mind 1,200 times since it happened, walked up to the oven and paused for a moment to look through the window at what was inside. The reason this moment keeps bothering me is because it is the moment I could have changed what happened next. I could have told Kate to move away from the oven. I could have made her move. She weighs all of 22 pounds. She pretty much has to do what I say. But it never occurred to me that she was going to do what she did next, which is that she stuck her fingers in between the bottom of the oven door and the broiler compartment of our gas oven. It's an external part of the oven, and I would not have thought it was very hot. Of course, being a rational adult, I would never stick my hand down there to check, either. And it turns out that it is hot, in case you wondered. Really freaking hot.

Over the course of the next hour, there was a lot of crying, some of it done by Kate, plenty of it done by me, and her poor little fingers developed some pretty rough looking blisters. Kate eventually fell asleep, and when she woke up in the morning, she actually didn't seem to be in any pain at all. But her hand looked just terrible, especially this one blister that I promise you was the size of a dime and thicker than the entire circumference of the finger it was on. So that afternoon, we took her to urgent care, where I told the whole story to at least four surprisingly understanding health care professionals, none of whom tried to make me feel worse about what had happened, and Kate's hand was examined by a doctor who pronounced it to be healing just fine. Ten days later, I can barely even tell where the burns were. Kids' skin heals so amazingly quickly, certainly by design since they are so very haphazard with it.

Skipping the part where I process all the massive guilt that I STILL feel about Kate's accident, let us move along to Incident No. 2. This Saturday morning, a week after the oven drama, Dan and Kate went on their usual trip to Einstein's Bagels to have some daddy daughter time and let me catch a few extra minutes of sleep. (Bless that wonderful husband of mine for starting this tradition.) This went fine until Dan attempted to drive home on a New Mexico Freeway, an absolute obstacle course of orange cones, uneven lanes and concrete barriers. I have been living in Albuquerque for six years now, and they have been doing some form of construction on some part of this particular Interstate for all six of those years. It. Never. Ends.

In traffic on this particular morning, Dan was being edged closer and closer to the barrier for one of these construction projects by a semi truck driver who was taking more than his fair share of the road. On Dan's left hand side was a long line of the never-ending New Mexico orange cones, and Dan managed to avoid hitting all of them. Except for the last one, which was conveniently located about two feet further into the line of traffic than the rest. That one caught the side mirror on our Saturn and blasted it into oblivion. The mirror was hanging on to the car by a mangled cable when Dan made it home. The car insurance representative Dan had on speaker phone a few minutes later actually asked if the orange cone was damaged. Because that is the main thing.

Now, as we move on to Incident No. 3, bear in mind that the preceding story was about our blue Saturn, the car that I usually drive. Dan drives a silver Nissan Sentra to work, a car that is extremely reliable and efficient, if comically small for Dan, since it used to be my car. Dan basically folds himself into it, and one day I expect his feet to pop out of the bottom of it, like a Flintstone car. This car is generally parked in our driveway. Yesterday morning, I woke up a little bit when Dan left the house at his usual crack-of-dawn hour, but quickly fell back asleep. So I was startled when about five minutes later, I opened by eyes and Dan was standing right there at my bedside again, asking if I left anything important in the Nissan the last time I drove it. No, I said, and I think I actually rolled over in bed before it occurred to me to ask why he needed to know this? Why? Oh, well, just because someone broke into the car last night.

Technically, it's a bit of a stretch to say they broke in. There wasn't any breaking in involved, since we hadn't locked the car. But it's not like that makes it totally cool that someone just opened up our car and rooted around to see what they could take. The take-home lesson for any would-be car plunderers might be that you should target higher-end vehicles if you want to find anything worth taking, because all they got out of our car was Dan's XM Radio equipment and an i-Pod tramsmitter. Since there is also a garage door opener in our car and anyone who was in the car could easily have gotten into the garage, we took a good look around there to make sure our highly valuable collection of half-empty paint cans, bags of outgrown baby clothes and dirty laundry was safe. Surprisingly, it was untouched.

I'm not sure I have come to any really deep conclusions about this week we've had. Out of everything that happened, the only thing I still feel upset about is Kate's hand getting burned, and even that could have been much worse. The rearview mirror thing was mildly inconvenient, since we have to wait for the part to come in and in the meantime I'm turning around completely backward in my seat every time I need to change lanes. But Kate and Dan weren't hurt. The door between our garage and our house was deadbolted, so I don't feel creeped out by the thought of anyone having a serious chance to be in our house. I'm thankful I don't have anything to be more concerned about from any of these incidents. I don't actually believe in luck, but all the same, I don't think this would be my best week to go to Vegas. I worry that maybe a slot machine would fall over and break my toe.