“Getting Fancy With the Spices”

The way the layout of our house is setup, you go through the kitchen to get to the back yard. My children have managed to take much advantage of this in the last few days. The problem is that if I am in another room besides the kitchen or the dining room, I don’t have a direct line of sight on them. And in those moments, when I am anywhere else, which I often am, they like to take things outside that shouldn’t go outside.

It was very quiet in the house, and the boys had been playing in the backyard for a while. When boys are happily playing for a long time, it usually means they are doing something they shouldn’t be doing. When I went outside, what I found did not make me happy. They had taken my salt, pepper, paprika and a couple of Mrs. Dash spice blends and dumped them all out in the dirt. The majority of them of them I had purchased recently and were mostly full. I cannot even say how angry I was.

I might not have been so angry, if I felt that Malachi had any remorse whatsoever. But he seemed very indifferent to the whole situation. Aaron helped him with that by taking one of his toys and throwing it to the neighbor’s dogs so he could understand how it felt to have something taken away.

All I could think of was that line in the movie Ratatouille when Linguini says to Remy, the rat/chef, “You were the one gettin’ fancy with the spices!” I hoped that it wouldn’t happen again.

This morning, Malachi went to the store with Aaron, and I was here with Izzy and Simeon. Izzy was outside and I was on the computer. Very soon, he came to me with an empty egg carton. I wanted to believe that he had gotten it out of the trash and it had already been empty. Unfortunately, that wasn’t so. If I wondered where the eggs had gone, I got my first clue when he mentioned his backpack. And then, the mystery was dissolved when he came dragging his Elmo backpack into the movie room. I looked inside, and sure enough, there are eggs in there. There are also eggs all over the floor of the back porch. Sigh. I go through all the eggs, throwing away all the broken and cracked ones, about eight or so. I wash off the ones that are still okay. There’s three. I clean up the eggs that are in a puddle on the floor. I give Izzy a spanking, though he doesn’t seem to think he deserves one. I feel strangely emotionless. I am not angry. I am resigned. Is this a bad sign? I’m not sure.

Thinking about it later, I began to wonder what they might take next. Maybe tomorrow they will dump out all my flour. Or the sugar. Who knows? Then I think, with all those ingredients, maybe they’ll bring me back a cake. Wouldn’t that be nice.