"Break Resistant" Is Not The Same As Shatter Proof

Tonight's mess makes the top five Laundry Pile Family messes of all time. Maybe the top three.

Others in the top five include :

• Jack Vs. The Carpet.
• An incident that was pre-blogging days involving our oldest child (then two-ish), an entire jug of liquid laundry detergent, and the bedroom carpet of our rented apartment.
  
• Anything involving barf.
  
• Anything involving Desitin

This was a different kind of mess; this one involved a plate. A Corelle plate. They are supposed to be pretty difficult to break. Broken plates have happened before around here but always on a hard kitchen floor; a surface that can be swept and mopped.

Tonight we were eating supper on the deck. While that sounds summery, nostalgic, and very Norman Rockwell of us, the reality is that I have too many stacks of to-be-sorted papers on the kitchen table to actually eat there. So we ate our BLT's outside. One plate ended up balancing on the deck railing and eventually made the inevitable plunge down, down, down into the sandbox. Which would have been fine except for the fact that our artsy-fartsy sandbox is edged in boulders. Of course the plate landed directly on one of the boulders and proceeded to shatter into a million pieces, most of them microscopic. I almost cried.

The glass was as widespread as ten feet away from the original break all the way into the grass. I hand picked every single visible piece and then I skimmed off the top layer of sand. The sandbox is now off limits to all children until the sand can be replaced.

Tomorrow is the last day of school. Nothing says summer vacation like a sandbox full of shards of glass. Good dang times.