How to babysit your freezer...

...decide to finally defrost it after three years.

1. Wait for a freezing cold day. Gather all your laundry baskets and place all your food from your freezer in them. Place baskets full of food on your back deck and pray the temperature stays below freezing. (It was snowing, I wasn't too worried).
2. Unplug freezer and gather every towel in your entire house.
3. Boil water in pots and place in freezer after you've put towels down to catch the melting ice.
4. Keep water hot all day by continually boiling water in every pot you own and every heating unit you own including the stove pot, microwave and coffee maker.
5. Keep your towels moving about every 15 minutes from freezer, to washer spin cycle, to dryer, back to freezer, etc...
6. Add warm water and rubbing alcohol to spray bottle and spray down ice each time you rotate towels.
7. Clean freezer out completely. Dry freezer completely using two towels and a box fan.
8. Plug freezer back in and allow to cool. Replace food - pulling out the items that started to thaw for next week's dinners (yea, apparently it wasn't below freezing all day), writing down the food that you put back in the freezer on a list (so you have an 'at-a-glance' idea about what's inside, so you don't have to open freezer so much, so defrosting the freezer next time won't be such a HUGE job.)

Now, consider steps 4 - 6. Every fifteen minutes, you need to start the towel/spray/switch water cycle and that cycle takes 5 minutes to complete. That really only leaves about 10 minutes in between cycles for other non-freezer related activities. Oh, wait...but you have to keep water boiling and you have two kids underfoot 'cause your hubby is being a sweetie and helping a friend move. I started around 9:30 this morning and finally finished around 6:00 this evening.

Oh, well, it needed to be done. I have double the freezer space and a great feeling of accomplishment now that it's done.