Breakfast with the Colemans, also - the "molasses hand" story

-
6am Saturday - I wake and stumble downstairs. Chappie gleefully follows. It's Saturday - she doesn't have to wait for showers before breakfast. 6:02 - Chappie's done with her morning activities and I can settle down to read the newspaper. The dog is in a vocal mood this morning - she lays in her dog bed and moans.

8:00 - Sonic and Tails (aka Melinda and Gretchen) saunter downstairs. Prof McGonagall (Tracey) soon to follow.

Melinda and Gretchen are in the mood to make their own breakfasts. Gretchen decides on "Gretchen-style-french-toast." For the uninitiated - this means toast with maple syrup on it. Today, she supplemented with peanuts. As she poured the syrup - Tracey called out "No molasses hand"

Aside on the term "molasses hand"
When Melinda was in pre-K and she stayed for past the morning session, she needed a sack lunch. Occasionally I won the preparation lottery. Frequently, Melinda wanted to participate in food selection. On the day in question, she decided she wanted a molasses sandwich - and wanted hands-on involvement. I recall peanut butter and molasses sandwiches from my childhood (and liking them) so I was ok with the experiment.

I put two slices of bread on a plate, opened a new jar of molasses, turned to get a knife for the molasses, and turned back to observe Melinda holding the inverted jar of molasses over the bread... Now, molasses comes out slowly, but unfortunately, not that slowly... 5 minutes of cleaning, 2 new slices of bread and close to half a jar of molasses later, we had our sandwich.

The next day when Tracey picked Melinda up from pre-school, the teacher enquired, "Molasses sandwich, Mom?" Not the first time Tracey was surprised by her rogue husband.


While I was ensuring no repeat of the molasses-hand incident, Melinda had gotten out the pampered chef chopper and a bag of pecans. Her breakfast was chopped pecans, powered sugar and a little bit of milk. I offered cheerios to cut the sweetness - but she was having none of that. She is the scientist of the family, and likes to mix things together.

Tracey is off doing AXO stuff today - I've got the sweet urchins all to myself. I'm thinking dinner and a movie.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teaching Day 2 - post arctic blast

-
A teacher's institute day and a cold weather day with no classes and three weeks have passed.  It's probably a bit too much to expect kids to remember anything. So we started again. Boys are still squirrels and girls are quiet rule followers.  This is an after school activity; kids are a little wound up.  They still have to take turns, mind their business and be good classroom citizens.  Clearly, that's difficult.  Our class is 2nd graders to 6th graders.  We split into two groups.  I've got the little ones - 2nd and 3rd graders. They have trouble clicking in small spaces and finding letters on the keyboard. Today, the curriculum tried to introduce a looping construct (repeat a set of instructions over and over) and more debugging (here's a program; there's something wrong with it - fix it).  Tall order.  I can see some deficiencies with the program for little hands.  If they move some of the blocks too far out of the way, it behave...
Read more

Surprises on my final day

-
Image
It's surprising to me that in only a couple hours, I've been able to learn so much about people that I've been interacting over the phone for the last three months. The view I had been able to build was so incomplete. A meal here, a short conversation there - suddenly these relationships go from being superficial and one-dimensional to much richer. People that I've been speaking with have families and lives outside of work (not really an earth shattering revelation, but I surprised at how much it matters). It is also surprising (to me) that my capacity and willingness to try new things has limits. At home, I am always pushing for, "Let's go out and eat Chinese, or Korean or Indian." I thought I was game for anything new any time (or all the time). I've found that after only a week, I'm actually hungering for something more familiar more what I'm used to. Aside - I'm actually thinking back to my lunch. I had a dish (Indian obviousl...
Read more

Teaching day 1

-
My kids are off at University and all my high school booster responsibilities are done.  I've downsized and I have some extra free time.  For years I've said that I would like to teach and a little opportunity to do just that came up.  I grabbed it. I've found a company run by a tech guy in his spare time that offers various after school STEM programs.  He's got loads of things he offers to schools / PTAs.  This group selected  an after school enrichment class in software coding.  The curriculum is self paced and drag & drop.  The essentially make programs out of virtual Lego blocks.  Today was the first day of class.  We're got kids from 1st grade to 6th grade.  There's 13 of them.   Some observations.  Second graders are different than 5th graders.  The little kids' fine motor skills are not as developed as the big kids.  Mouse pad movements was often done with their ...
Read more