Rainy Morning

Yesterday the power and the water were both on all day, so I managed to get four loads of laundry done.  To do multiple loads takes being home all day, since the ordinary wash cycle that gets the clothes clean takes well over two hours, although there is also a short cycle that gets the clothes simply less-dirty.  A confluence of all those things doesn't happen every day, so our dirty laundry was building up.  And now it is all out on the line, where it got rained on all night long, and it being rained on yet.  This is not actually improving the what-to-wear situation.


I planned on not just sitting at my computer, and thus taking a walk first thing after breakfast.  That plan is also scuttled by the rain.  Taking a walk with nowhere particular to go and nothing particular to see and no particular ambience is uninspiring enough.  Doing it in ankle-deep mud while trucks bellow down the middle of the road and spray puddles everywhere...  If it ever seemed like a good idea, it does not today, when we haven't got any clothes to change into!


I have had the clever idea of serving the kids hot chocolate in the mornings.  They liked it so much at Budongo Forest, and I figured then they would get some milk, with its protein and fat, to help balance out the kids' usual toast-only breakfast.  The girls were used to drinking tea, which I make with seconds of my tea bag and mostly milk, but although they all ask for tea Buttercup is the only one who actually drinks it.  So the hot chocolate was my next attempt at adding some dairy to their breakfasts and their day.

Then I realized that most parents probably just give their children a glass of milk.  That seems to be a fairly standard childhood beverage.  I don't' know if my brood would drink that; I personally hate milk so much that it has not yet occurred to me to try!


Except the hot chocolate experiment is about to be vastly curtailed.  The children seem to want to spend most of their breakfast time stirring the dang things, and even when I didn't provide any stir-ers this morning I found Emerson re-appropriating the butter knife.  And Hibiscus has spilled her entire cup both mornings in a row, after a great deal of contemplating and stirring and wiggling and so forth.  But she's going to be mad at me when I point out that she has spilled it so consistently that she won't get any more, because the first morning she simply booby trapped it so effectively that I was the one to actually pull the trigger on the poor cup.  She was fiddling with anything and everything on the table (instead of eating before the bus comes, which is my idea).  She had moved over a plastic bag, and for some reason the cup was invisibly sitting on part of it and she was fiddling with the other part.  I told her twice to put the bag down, and she ignored me, so I took it away from her, which of course pulled the other part out from under her cup.  How mean of me!  This morning I don't know what she was doing, but I know that she was very proud of wearing a very cute outfit with a brand new shirt and pants from Auntie Becca, and she looked graceful and American and very pleased with herself.  And then she dumped hot chocolate all over everything, with plenty left over for the chair cushions and table as well.

And the Buttercup spilled her hot chocolate, too.  At least she had the consideration to drink most of it first.  She didn't like the part with the little bubbles and flecks of chocolate powder; I think she thought it looked like a bug.  I stirred it and made it all go away, but she still viewed the drink with great suspician.  I wouldn't "fix" it any more (I didn't see anything to fix) and I wouldn't give her a kitchen full of tools to fix it herself (and dribble it everywhere), so finally she glared and gave it a little toss over onto Emerson's used breakfast plate.  Needless to say, when you give a quarter-full cup a little toss, it gets hot chocolate everywhere.


Except on Hibiscus's shirt, because she had insisted on wearing it to school.  Which is just as well, because none of her other shirts are dry anyways.