DISCLAIMER: This blog post contains many kitchen applicance "name dropping". For those of you that think that may be a bit too pretentious I'll give you a short version of this probably going to be too long blog post....Andrew and I were "parents" this weekend....He turned 31 this weekend (HOORAY!)....I almost burned down our house...and it was only TODAY that I realized I did EVERYTHING wrong (that would have been more helpful to know YESTERDAY oh well...)
Okay so I'll start by saying that EVERYTHING may be a bit dramatic, but I did do my fair share of "mess-ups". I'll get to those soon, first off I would like to say CONGRATULATIONS to our friends Liz and Scott who had their third child, Benjamin this weekend. Scott was deployed and returned home a week early only to have his first baby boy born 1 day later! Perfect timing! Since we're friends with this awesome couple, Andrew and I had volunteered to watch their two adorable daughters during the night while Liz was in the hospital. We found out, PARENTING IS HARD! Not complaining, but moreso saying that in admiration for all those who are or have been parents. I mean I've baby sat before, but it's been a long time, I guess I forgot how tiring children are. (Where do they get their energy?) I would like to note that we think these were the easiest children to take care of given their respective ages (4 and 2). They are both EXTREMELY smart and very verbal, they can say what they want/need and understand what was going on, their mommy prepared them well.
(Swinging on Friday night)
We watched the girls Friday night and thought "Hey, we can do this! Just feed them, play with them, piece of cake!" (I know all you parents are chuckling by now....) Since we have Chloe and we didn't want to leave her alone at night (she would FREAK OUT) I stayed overnight with the girls so that they could sleep in their home and Andrew stayed at our house with Chloe. (Our friend is allergic to dogs hence we didn't bring Chloe with us for all of you that already devised that solution in your head). Saturday morning I had to go to work so Andrew came over and made the girls pancakes and then took them over to another friend's house to play for the day.
I got off work and Andrew and I were planning on going out that night but decided that we didn't have time because we were responsible for the girls that night so we just went to the gym (it had been a few days and we NEEDED it), ate dinner, and picked up the girls. On the way over to their house it started raining quite a lot (side note: Chloe is VERY AFRAID of thunder/lightening) so we decided to divide and conquer so I hung out with the girls at their house and Andrew when home and took care of Chloe. Once again, same sleeping arrangements.
On Sunday (Andrew's Birthday), I got the girls up, fed, dressed and ready for church and thought of what I thought was a GENIUS plan (note this is where all my mistakes happen). I knew I needed to make a cake so I had Andrew pick the girls and I up and take us to our house where I would make his birthday cake and he and the girls could watch Fantasia before church (they wanted to watch it, we had it, I could bake Andrew's cake= PERFECT!)
Cute 4-year-old on our way to our house before church
The cute 2-year-old making a funny face!
We got to our house I started baking my first vanilla cake from scratch using a recipe I found on a AWESOME app (AllRecipes, GET IT). Little did I know this cake was a bit above my skill level (and by bit I mean a lot). You had to make a meringue (I didn't even know what that was), I started will all the usual components first and then tackled the meringue. I had been blending for 10 mins with my beautiful 9-speed hand mixer (during the blending I did stop to take a break to tell Andrew how much I loved it- it was a Christmas present from him). Nothing was happening with the egg whites. So I turned to trusty youtube and found that they should have made this crazy frothy texture and like a long time ago. MISTAKE 1. I somehow messed up making meringue. It had taken me eight eggs to get four in the bowl that didn't include yolk so needless to say we were out of eggs and I couldn't try again. In the process of messing up the meringue I had set the sugar container on the burner and it MELTED, mind you the burner wasn't on but it was on the burner that had the oven vent MISTAKE TWO. I picked up the container from off the stove and about 2.5 lbs of sugar came GUSHING out the bottom. I quickly maneuvered it to the sink where the remaining 2.5 lbs of sugar spilled into the sink (not on the disposal side, mind you). Each time Andrew jumped up to help me and with our two minds we decided to brilliantly just wash the sugar down the drain. Well, we clogged the drain (4th grade science "saturated solution" ring bells for anyone?)
By this time Andrew took the girls over to another friends house and they took the girls to church. While he was gone I was determined to fix the sink. I decided if I ran the disposal maybe that would help (since both pipes are connected...that was my reasoning) well I made sure the water was running down the disposal side and ran the disposal, it seemed to be helping a little bit but the the disposal pooped out MISTAKE 3, I broke our disposal. When I told Andrew what I did, he laughed, when I told him it was probably running for 5 mins, his eyebrows rose and he gave me a "5 MINUTES?!!?" I then told him okay, maybe 3.5 to 4 minutes, I really don't know how long it ran but it broke :(. Not deterred by breaking that, I decided that I was going to exercise my plumber skills (as learned by Mario and Luigi, I really have no other experience) and loosen the pipes to get the sugar out. I thought ahead this time and put the largest pot underneath when I was planning on taking off the pipe to catch the falling sugar/water. I loosened the pipe ever so slightly AND IT WORKED instantly it was as if I opened a closed drain and it fell down freely! Confident that I had fixed the sink I prepared for Andrew to come home and celebrate his birthday (see pics below)
By this time Andrew took the girls over to another friends house and they took the girls to church. While he was gone I was determined to fix the sink. I decided if I ran the disposal maybe that would help (since both pipes are connected...that was my reasoning) well I made sure the water was running down the disposal side and ran the disposal, it seemed to be helping a little bit but the the disposal pooped out MISTAKE 3, I broke our disposal. When I told Andrew what I did, he laughed, when I told him it was probably running for 5 mins, his eyebrows rose and he gave me a "5 MINUTES?!!?" I then told him okay, maybe 3.5 to 4 minutes, I really don't know how long it ran but it broke :(. Not deterred by breaking that, I decided that I was going to exercise my plumber skills (as learned by Mario and Luigi, I really have no other experience) and loosen the pipes to get the sugar out. I thought ahead this time and put the largest pot underneath when I was planning on taking off the pipe to catch the falling sugar/water. I loosened the pipe ever so slightly AND IT WORKED instantly it was as if I opened a closed drain and it fell down freely! Confident that I had fixed the sink I prepared for Andrew to come home and celebrate his birthday (see pics below)
(My family's tradition to take a picture with all the opened and unopened presents, I forgot the unopened picture MISTAKE 4)
(We put all of the bows on Chloe, as you can see, she LOVED IT, HA!)
(Chloe at her favor place- the big bed- with the bows= not her favorite)
He opened presents, I went and taught Sunday School at church, and then we ran to Pensacola to have the birthday date that was planned for Saturday night (ironic that my lesson at church was supposed to be on Hypocrisy, ugh story of my life!) We went and saw Super 8, Andrew's pick, I thought it was a well done movie, totally worth a watch and the price of a Sunday matinee! After the movie we ate dinner at our FAVORITE PLACE MELLOW MUSHROOM! We got our usual order's and I covertly told the server it was Andrew's birthday. After we were fully stuffed with our pizza he brought out this HUGE cookie/ice cream creation! Andrew took one for the team and ate all the ice cream and I helped him eat a little of the cookie. Then we went to Target and I got him candles and a birthday card MISTAKES 5 & 6.
We then went home, realized that I didn't have enough time to try and make the cake (we bought eggs and an egg separator- so sue us!) So I went and picked up the girls while Andrew stayed with Chloe since we had been gone for a while (we just felt so bad leaving her so much this weekend, it didn't seem nice/fair). I put the girls to bed and dropped them off at another friend's house this morning. I thought all my mistakes would have been over, NOT.
Determined to make Andrew a birthday cake (albeit a day late) I tried the meringue again while I warmed up the oven. IT WORKED!!! Maybe it was youtube, the separator, or a combination of the two but I felt successful that it worked! While I was whipping the meringue there was a bit of smoke coming out of the oven vent in the burner element, I thought, oh a little sugar must have fallen down there. Chloe is SCARED TO DEATH when our OVERLY SENSITIVE smoke detector goes off so I start fanning the smoke with a kitchen cloth while whipping my meringue (all the while I am thinking, "I am so cool look at all this multi-tasking!") The smoke grew larger and larger and as I looked in the oven I noticed that it was quite a lot of sugar that fell in the oven via the vent. I turned the oven off and let it cool down. When I opened it up there was a HUGE PILE of melted sugar on the bottom of the oven MISTAKE 7 burned sugar to the bottom of my oven. As I looked at it I knew there was NO WAY that Andrew's cake would be baked that day. Then I had the brilliant idea to scrape it off with a sponge= didn't work. I didn't want to use my good cutlery to try to dislodge the sugar so I tried to look for any of our odds and ends for our college days, had I given it all away? OF COURSE I HAD! Then I started to get desperate so I took one of my Pottery Barn knives and started scraping, it did just the trick and it didn't ruin my knife! Just that experience makes me want to do more business with that company!
During that experience I realized that yesterday I put the beaters on my hand mixer incorrectly and that is a BAD THING! They were stuck on! MISTAKE 8. I could have waited for Andrew to come home and use his man muscles to dislodge my poor beaters, but I felt too bad for my very much loved mixer. So I got all Miss Miller on it (do yourself a favor and watch The Chipmunk Adventure, you'll know what I'm talking about). I cleaned up that mess and gave my mixer a hug and possibly a get-better-kiss (it still works, mind you) and put the cakes in the oven.
In other news, both of the girls ABSOLUTELY LOVED ANDREW, they told him many times that he was their "favorite". Through this experience I have decided that when we have children (and this is NOT an announcement, we are still thinking a few years down the road) that Andrew will be the favorite for just being himself and I will possibly burn our house down or do any of my aforementioned mistakes, but times a million! In other words, when we have kids PRAY FOR US!
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