Tag Archives: humor

Cupcakes Wars. It’s About to Get Real.

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I timed us. It took 92 minutes for Piper, Sissy, and me to make a dozen raspberry lemondade cupcakes. Yum.

Sissy and I made the cake. From scratch. With fresh lemon juice, lemon zest, and homemade raspberry puree. Piper and I made the icing. From scratch. I have powdered sugar in my hair to prove it (Piper did the pouring).

We aren’t ready for Cupcakes Wars, which happens to be our favorite show. During the first round of baking you have to make a dozen cupcakes in 30 minutes. If you make it to the final round, 1000 cupcakes in 2 hours. We aren’t prime time material.

92 minutes isn’t going to cut it. We may do okay in the taste test round, but then again, there weren’t any leftovers to share. Piper ate them all.

Go for the Green

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Piper’s new kindergarten teacher is a keeper. When Piper grew bored of coloring in her behavior report every day with the same boring green crayon, she let her color the square rainbow. “You’re in charge of you,” Mrs. Adams told her, “you know if you behaved, don’t you?” Piper did. 

When I met Mrs. Adams for the first time, I gushed about how glad we were that she’d shown up for her second day, too. My standards are now that low after Dear Kindergarten Teacher and Help Wanted.

Piper declared Mrs. Adams to be a good hugger. “You kind of just fall into her. I think she’s hugged a lot.”

Mrs. Adams had a positive report, too. “Oh, Piper!” she said. “I get her. I really do.”

And that’s good enough for me.

Can I Play?

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The hardest part of kindergarten so far is the schedule. Piper complains that all that school stuff cuts into her play time. Recess is never long enough either. So she sneaks in moments of play wherever she can.

There are horse figurines and rocks scattered on the bathroom vanity where Piper played while brushing her teeth. She kneels by her bedside and plays with her stuffed animals while I braid her hair. Toys aren’t allowed at the breakslowfast table, but Piper likes to make her vitamins talk to each other. “It’s time to leave for school!” is always met with “But I was playing!” You can’t watch screens in our house before school either (I’m a real meanie, aren’t I?) so My Little Ponies and Luke Skywalker help Piper put on her shoes. There are also her imaginary friends and the voices in her head to contend with, too.

Bath time and/or her shower necessitates an entire bowl full of plastic jungle animals. The bowl serves as a floating raft in case there is a flood. There is often a flood. Whenever Piper climbs into her booster seat in the car, she first has to remove an army of toys that she left there from the last play session. When reading, Piper has to have representative “guys” to act out the story that’s happening on the page. It takes us a long time to get through a page.

So Saturday morning when Piper wakes up at the crack of dawn and asks “Can I play?” I get to say yes and go back to sleep.

Painted Piggies

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I locked myself out of my office at work today. Twice. My mind has been preoccupied worrying about Piper’s kindergarten trauma drama. I’ve also just met my fifty-two new freshman who seem to be going through their own new school adjustments.

Piper locked herself in the bathroom at school. Twice. She said it was nice and quiet in there. She wanted a little peace, a moment away from the substitute madness. One of her classmates banged on the door while Piper was taking a break from it all. “What did you do?” I asked.

“I ignored him,” she said. “I wasn’t done yet. Besides, there’s another bathroom. Geez.”

We spent the afternoon recovering in the only way we know how. We ordered pizza,  curled up with Sissy on the couch to catch up on Cupcake Wars, and painted our toenails.

Now at least we’re ready to face tomorrow’s challenges with rainbow piggies. Oink.

Call of the Cutie

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I wish that my knowledge of My Little Pony were not so vast and varied but it is. I owe it all to Piper. She’s spent a good part of the summer catching up on Friendship is Magic episodes. She’s memorized each complex plot line and adopted new vocabulary from the shows. She’s learned to read a dozen words on the screen so that she can select episodes for multiple viewings.  One of her favorites is “Call of the Cutie” in which each pony is awarded their own special “cutie mark.” I can’t make stuff like this up. Here’s the gripping episode teaser:

First your flank is blank. Then one day, you get your cutie mark! How can Apple Bloom get this sign that shows what makes her special? When will it happen?

If you really must know the answer, you can find the My Little Pony channel on You Tube and finish the episode. Or you can just call Piper and she’ll explain every single detail.

Piper’s assigned each of us our very own “cutie mark,” too. It’s how she likes to define people. Grandpa’s “cutie mark” would be a fishing pole. Grandma’s would be a sewing machine. Sissy’s is a book. Daddy’s is his IPhone. She gave me a heart. Ahhh.

“I wonder what my cutie mark would be?” she asked, assessing her naked backside to see if she already had a cutie mark. She doesn’t. Whew. “Maybe a dog? I do love dogs. Maybe a rainbow! Cuz I love rainbows.”

“Maybe a tutu?” I offered. Piper rolled her eyes. My suggestions these days are met with a lot of eye rolling.

“I know!” she exclaimed. “My cutie mark would be an exclamation point!”

“Do you know what an exclamation point is?” I asked. Surely, she hasn’t mastered punctuation yet.

“Sure. They’re all over the My Little Pony episodes. Whenever they have a sign or write a note it’s got that line and a dot that says they’re all excited. My cutie mark would be that!”

Scarier Words Were Never Spoken: Doodie!

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“Don’t worry, Mom.  I picked up the poop and put it back in the toilet,” Piper said casually, patting my back for comfort.

I stopped myself from asking how it got out of the toilet. No answer is going to make me feel better.

“Did you wash your hands?” I asked, peeling her paws off my shoulders.

“Be right back!” Piper skipped happily from the room.

Ugh.

Drum Circle or Bust

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A Piper loves music. And noise. And dancing noisily to music of any kind. When given the choice of musical instruments, Piper chose the drums. Against our better judgement, we got her her very own drum set for her birthday. I blogged about that mistake in her Birthday Blog.

Sometimes we even stumble upon music and add our own kind of noise, like the time we joined the O Street Band.

So, it seems a natural progression in the musical education of Piper to introduce her to her first drum circle. We’re in Asheville, North Carolina for the week (hiding in plain sight of Sissy’s camp because that’s the kind of mom I am). If any town in this country has a drum circle on a Friday night, it’s Asheville. After dinner last night, we went in search. The thing about a drum circle is that they really aren’t that hard to find. Like Piper, a drum circle has a lot of noisy dancing to music of any kind. You can hear them blocks away.

Piper has always marched to the beat of her own drum. It was her first drum circle, but it definitely won’t be her last.

Go Climb a Tree Part 2

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When you’re a Piper, sometimes you go for a hike around a lake.

And it’s a good hike with trails and covered walkways. You jump and dance and leap about the lake. And then, you find a clump of cool trees. So, of course, you climb in them.

But you walk straight into a mess of spider webs. You come running right back out because spiders give you the eebie-jeebies, you say.

“Wait!” you say, “I love spiders because they eat all the other bugs I don’t like. I’m going back in!” And you do.

The end.

Here’s another version of the same story: Go Climb a Tree

To Catch the Sun

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While Sissy is away at camp, Piper and I are having our own little camp alternating between hikes, museums, and arts and craft projects. Today, our task was to paint a suncatcher. It looked easy enough.

I carefully read the directions out loud. “Looks like each paint color has a number that matches a place on the suncatcher,” I explained. The diagram was a bit tedious, but with Sissy away, I have plenty of time for complicated art projects that require more than my normal reserves of patience.

“Or you could just make it look pretty,” Piper suggested. “There’s a picture of the butterfly already painted. We could just follow that.”

Which is about ten times easier than the stupid color-coded number instructions. Good idea, P.

We opened the first miniature pot of pink stain. The kit comes with a plastic “stain spreader” rather than a paint brush, which adds an extra element of danger.

An hour later, we’d made some progress. Piper stuck with it. Until she decided that she needed an assistant. “An artist needs help, Mom. They need someone to tell what to do. An artist gets tired, you know.”

“Let me guess. I’m going to be your assistant?”

“Yes! I’ll be the master artist and direct you!”

It sounded like another excuse to boss me around, but we were approaching hour two and my back was beginning to ache.

So, with the handy help of the assistant and the bossiness of the master artist, we completed our creation. Ta da! And I learned that Piper is much better at giving artistic direction than following package directions. We can’t wait for Sissy to see our masterpiece.