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The best of intentions
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. My husband, who was away from home for five weeks, feels he can make it up through another cliche: The way to a man's (or in this case a child's) heart is through his stomach. He believes a hot, multi-course breakfast is necessary every morning.
Never mind that he and the children didn't get out of bed until 9:30 and breakfast will take until 10:30 a.m. to make. Never mind that the entire family is expected at an 11 a.m. brunch and we will have to quickly eat breakfast to make it to the brunch. Never mind that the children have mid-morning swim lessons and won't have a half-hour of rest before getting in the water as, I believe, mandated by state law.
Regardless, the family will not leave the house without a hot breakfast, which a majority of the time is a waste on children.
In the first place, children are not impressed with fancy meals.
Give a child cold cereal where the marshmallows outnumber the actual bits of cereal and the 3-year-old will think he is in heaven. Read a child Goldilocks and the Three Bears before bedtime and the next morning the child's breakfast request will likely center around her porridge not being too hot or too cold.
But my husband still insists on getting out the cookbook and firing up the stove top and oven (always pleasant when it's already 96 degrees at 9:06 a.m.), which was fine until recently when breakfast was interrupted by flying glass, exploding eggs, blood stains on the floor and three "starving" children moaning about breakfast.
The morning began as usual with the children waking and immediately crying that they were hungry and my husband still in bed. Seeing the cookbook sitting open on the counter top from the night before and bowls full of ingredients ready to go in the fridge, I said their dad had something already planned for breakfast and they would have to wait. Little did I know it would be a one and one-half hour wait.
After gently waking my husband up using the jumping-on-the-bed skills of a 2-, 4- and 5-year-old, he stumbled to the kitchen and began making a brand new recipe from the cookbook. With eggs cooking on the stove and children watching contentedly, I wandered to the other end of the house. Everything proceeded smoothly until a heard a pop, then a snap, then a crackle, followed soon by frantic yells. Rounding the corner into the kitchen I discovered that the glass pie plate on the stove had exploded into 623 pieces, eggs now covered two-thirds of the kitchen and my husband has stepped on the glass and then made blood-stained tracks across the floor.
Yet, as we swept up glass from the corner in the opposite side of the room, wiped away eggs running down the side of the cabinets and tried to stop the bleeding from my husband's feet, my children had one question -- when was breakfast going to be ready?
While for most people, the story would end here -- not in this case.
For several days following the exploding eggs incident, an odor in the kitchen continued to grow. We diligently emptied the garbage, trying to rid the room of the smell, while guests politely ignored the smell, wondering why we didn't just empty our garbage more often. Still the stench remained.
One week later, we finally discovered the source of the smell -- a jar under the counter which caught spills from the stove top -- was filled with remnants of the eggs. Since this a newspaper and we haven't mastered the process of installing smells into the pages, a description will have to do here.
Imagine finding a jar filled with non-cooked scrambled eggs which has been sitting around for a week. Now place that jar in a house which has not been air conditioned yet this year and has been warm enough to melt chocolate chip cookies. Let's put it this way, we couldn't empty the jar into the toilet quick enough for the smell not to permeate the kitchen and the bathroom for the next two days.
While the stench from the jar made everyone awake at the time sick to their stomach for the rest of the evening, there is a silver lining. Everyone was too sick to cook, so cold cereal ruled for a few days.