In Which Joey Makes Enough Tuna Salad To Feed A Small Army and Stabs Me In The Hand

A rather unusual title, I know. But bear with me.

Last night I got home at 5:30 to find my favorite Joey in the kitchen. The entire house smelled like tuna. I expected the house to smell like tuna last night because I'd planned to make tuna salad sandwiches for dinner.

I just hadn't expected Joey to make them. But there he was, happily dumping cans of tuna into my large white bowl and talking on the phone to his Pops (aka FIL#1).

WAIT--cans of tuna?

Sure enough, he'd opened two cans of tuna. And he was poking all the tuna with a fork. I wanted to ask why he was doing that, but he was on the phone with FIL#1 and I couldn't. I decided to leave him to his business to see how the tuna came out. He was, after all, following a recipe.

No wonder the tuna smell had been so strong when I walked in the door.

I sat down in the den to play with Henry. Joey got off the phone and hollered from the kitchen, "Why's the carrot slicer so big? Did we get a new one?"

"Yes," I replied, "But you're probably using the OXO one, it's larger than you're used to."

A few minutes later,

"But it's taking huge gashes out of the carrot..." He sort of trailed off.

"You just have to learn the way to hold this one," I replied. "They're all different."

"Come look at this and tell me if you think it needs another carrot," Joey said, and I moseyed my way in.

He was holding a cheese slicer in one hand and a carrot in the other. "See how many gashes it takes out of the carrot?"

I started to laugh. "Honey, that's a cheese slicer. You'll never get it to work properly on a carrot." I dug around in the kitchen tools drawer and held out the carrot slicer. "Here, try this one."

Joey wilted but gamely began peeling the carrot. "Wow, this works really well..."

He began chopping the vegetables up into minuscule pieces with my garlic chopper. I could tell that he was having a prodigious amount of fun, so I left him to his recipe again, now that the carrot crisis was over.

I decided to go to the bathroom to pluck my eyebrows. A few minutes later, Joey came in looking rather wilty (again) and said, "Um, I made a ton of tuna, didn't I?"

"Yeah, I usually only make one can." I said with a smile.

"Well, I put one can in and it didn't look like enough so I added another one, but now that I added the vegetables, um, it's huge."

"And it'll get bigger when we add the mayo!" I added. "We'll have tuna all week!"

We decided this was most definitely the worst problem we'd ever encountered, so we laughed, went back to the kitchen and finished making the tuna.

Joey made three sandwiches for dinner and we still have a whole bunch of tuna left over.

We probably will have tuna all week.

It was some of the best tuna salad I've ever had, though, regardless of quantity and I was so thankful that he was making dinner when I came home. A very lovely surprise.

When we were cleaning up from dinner (in a bit of a hurry as we have to rush off to youth group), I leaned across the dishwasher to support myself as I snuck by just as Joey put a knife into the silverware basket.

The knife stabbed my right hand by the pinkie knuckle and Joey, realizing what had happened, froze.

"DID I KILL YOU? ARE YOU OK? ARE YOU BLEEDING?" He panicked.

I sort of jumped and danced around the kitchen (not an easy task, we've got a smallish kitchen) then stopped and looked at my hand. I was very disappointed that there wasn't more carnage, it was barely bleeding and the cut wasn't deep at all.

A flesh wound, you might say.

Joey was still nervously watching me so I showed him the extent of the damage. "I'm SO sorry!" He repeated several times.

I willed the cut to be more gory. Nothing happened, so I gave up.

We finished cleaning up dinner in short order. Nothing else disastrous ensued, which was kind of nice.