A Small Everyday Disaster

 

In the four and a half years since the twins were born, I've successfully avoided almost all art projects. I'm not an artsy kind of person and Rocket Boy doesn't like big messes, so I think we both casually agreed that art was something the boos could do at daycare/school.

But as of last week, daycare has turned into preschool -- except that the "school" part happens in the morning and boos go to daycare in the afternoon. So mornings at home have become "homeschool preschool" and that pretty much inevitably means art projects. I'm trying to go with the flow. I'd rather do art with four year olds than two or three year olds. For example, as you can see in the photo above, boos have already done some cutting at daycare, so it is not so scary to turn them loose with scissors and old catalogs (as long as by "turn them loose" I mean "sit right next to them and watch them like a hawk").

I have to say that my admiration for REAL preschool teachers is growing by leaps and bounds. It's so hard to come up with creative learning activities. I need to get some books and workbooks, obviously (suggestions welcome!). Last night I was busy and didn't have time to plan an activity for today. When I woke up this morning I thought, oh let's just take it easy.

But the boos had other ideas. Every few weeks or so they pull out all their old Ladybug children's magazines (saved and sent to us by Aunt Baba) and ask me to read them. I feel that we ought to read the ones that correspond to the current month, but they have no such compunctions. This morning they wanted me to read a Ladybug from February 1993, so I did. And unfortunately, it contained this article:

"Mom!" Baby A said, in righteous indignation. "We never made cookies!"
"It's too hot to make cookies," I said. (It's supposed to be 104 today.)
"No! It's not too hot in the house!"
"That's because the air conditioner is on. If we make cookies, it will get hot in the house and then the air conditioner won't be able to cool it down."
"No! The hotness will stay in the oven!"
"No it won't."
"Yes it will!"
and on and on and on.
I really didn't want to make cookies today. No interest whatsoever. But then I studied the recipe more closely and I thought, Oh! We could decorate the cookies with letters! And that could be our "school" for the day!

So we made the cookies. First I had to clean up the kitchen, so that was good, because otherwise I might have found a way to put it off until dinnertime. Then I made the dough, while boos stood on their stools and watched with great interest (and sneaked tastes). Then I dropped teaspoonfuls of dough on the cookie sheet, and gave the boos little plastic cups to dip in sugar and flatten the cookies. Then we baked them (in a 400 degree oven, oh my poor air conditioner). All well and good.

Then it was time to start decorating. I fumbled around in my baking cupboard and found a box with little tubes of icing that you can write with. I wrote on some of the cookies and boos wrote on some of the others.

The tubes of icing were almost all used up, though, so I went back to the cupboard and got another box of tubes. OK, now here's where it gets interesting. If you saw two boxes like this in YOUR baking cupboard, wouldn't you think the red box contained the same thing as the yellow box?

Or would you be smart enough to actually READ what it said on the red box? If so, you're smarter than me. I gave the boos the tubes in the red box and they started working with them. I was cleaning up the mess they'd made with the sugar and not paying attention. When I came back to them I noticed that now some of the cookies had huge blobs of dark colored gel on them. "Oh no," I said, "what are you doing? Don't put so much frosting on the cookies!"

Boos apologized vaguely, and then I looked more closely at the blobs. They weren't icing. And then I went back to the red box and actually READ what it said on it: "Betty Crocker Classic Gel Food Colors." Food colors!!!!! Boos were squirting big blobs of food coloring on the cookies. Cue blood-curdling scream from Mom.

I didn't want to throw away a third of our cookies, so what I did was wipe them off, one by one, using Kleenex. Made a big mess, and afterwards the cookies looked weirdly stained. But food coloring isn't toxic, so oh well. I found one more tube of icing and let them finish off the last of the cookies. (The picture above was actually taken at that point -- you can see just a few of the more lightly stained cookies near Baby B's elbow.) By then it was 10:30 and we needed a break, so we went back to their room and read some more Ladybug magazines.

Oh, and you want to know the worst thing? The cookies are terrible! What a bad recipe! Only good thing is that I'm not going to eat them all while the boos are at daycare.