Recently, I found this great “cooking” project idea in a magazine.
Looks delicious and not too hard. I purchased the supplies, well…most of the supplies, cleaned off the counter, and got everything ready to make these beautiful halloween snacks.
Well…about halfway through melting the chocolate the baby decided to wake up, so I finished melting the chocolate and set everything out on the counter while I got the baby.
I was gone for less than 2 minutes and when I returned the girls had chairs pulled up and were ready to get to work. I held the baby and “supervised” the work. Supervised being defined as, pouring sprinkles, instructing the girls to share the sprinkles, showing them how to keep the marshmallows on the sticks, instructing the girls to share the chocolate, pouring more sprinkles, requesting that the girls please try to keep the sprinkles on the counter or on the marshmallows, pouring more sprinkles…
And…this is the result of my terrific halloween project!
I call the first picture “melted ghost”. The marshmallow with the green sprinkles is the Frankenstein, the orange ones are pumpkins, and I guess the purple one is a bat.
My husband got home shortly after we completed our project and commented that he had been hoping that I was going to make the marshmallows…well, I had intended to make at least a couple of them…
But, it wasn’t a big deal, the girls had fun, my oldest noticed that hers didn’t look quite like the picture but it was close enough.
There are those days that all I really want is perfection. I want my house to be clean, I want the kids to always obey, I want the kids to be clean, I want to be able to find my makeup (I’d even settle for finding a hair rubberband without having to dig through one of the kid’s drawers), I want to drink my cup of coffee while it’s hot, I’d like to sit down to drink my coffee, I want to work on my projects, I want to watch my shows instead of “Leap Frog” for the thousandth time, and on and on my list goes…
I get a few days like this every now and then. Like the day my husband watched all the kids so I could do something I really wanted to do for a few hours.
But most days look like the “melted ghost”, all the right ingredients are there they’ve just been touched by little fingers.
They’ve also been loved by little fingers, enjoyed by little fingers, and we’ve created memories for the little children with the little fingers.
I could have spent a long time working on these marshmallows and shooing the kids out of the kitchen so I could get my marshmallows just right. But in the end, they would be MY marshmallows. I would take pictures, post them on instigram and show everyone my success and then they would just sit on my counter uneaten just like these marshmallows did (because come to find out, no one in my house actually likes giant marshmallows dipped in chocolate).
Instead we had a huge mess, a child who was so proud of the eyes on her ghost, and girls who giggled for an hour making these marshmallows that no one ate. But no one cared that no one ate them…it was how we made them that was important.