Today, Little Girl tried to kill herself

While she was on the phone with her school-friend, Lily, she found my Pampered Chef metal cake testing toothpick thing and stuck it into the outlet under the phone cord. Because our kitchen phone hangs on the wall and she was facing the phone for a twenty minute conversation --always at top volume driving me out of the room -- I didn't know to worry until I saw fire flare out of the wall like a sparkler being set off.

She tells me -- when she stopped crying and I stopped yelling WTH? -- that we had NOT told her not to stick things in outlets. And we probably haven't for a few years, after teaching her infant self to fear them with loud noises and sudden movements. We might have told her three-year-old learning-independence self that she couldn't plug things in because outlets were dangerous, like we recently have for Little Boy, but we probably haven't mentioned outlets to her in several years. It probably just hasn't come up. She's seven and we almost certainly thought she would have known this one already.

If you have little ones, even if they're the big little ones that you don't feel you need to worry about any more -- bring it up. Just in case.

The outlet is melty and misshapen -- and that's not even the one she poked it in. That's the one the phone/answering machine was plugged into. And the metal toothpick thing is twisted and melted and ruined.

But thankfully Little Girl is fine.

As far as I can tell, she wasn't even shocked -- electricity shocked, at least. She was certainly shocked by the sudden fire. So this is probably the absolute best outcome we could have hoped for out of this. I got the electricity back and the phone even still works when I plug it in somewhere else.

I'm still a little shaky about it, but all-in-all it wasn't too bad.

And now we're pretty sure she won't stick anything in an outlet again. That's good, right?