"Mommy, I'm a Mess"

Lily and I had quite an evening in the kitchen tonight. We made a beef stew and cornbread for supper, and then we decided to bake a cake. (Okay, so it was from a box. We still baked it though....) After the cake came out of the over and cooled, we proceeded to frost it. After a base layer of white icing, Lily told me she wanted me to make a purple smiley face on the cake. We got out the food coloring and had a little lesson in colors. ("Mommy, I want purple." "We only have red, yellow, blue, and green. How do we make purple?" Etc....) After achieving purple frosting and making a satisfactory smiley face, we abandoned our post in the kitchen. About half an hour later, as I was giving Lauren a bottle, Lily calls out, "Mommy, I made a mess." Given that that's not a particularly unfamiliar phrase around our house, I didn't immediately spring into action. "What happened Lily?" I asked. The reply, "Mommy, I AM a mess!" came with a greater sense of urgency. "LOOK!" When I looked her direction, she was holding up her hands, which were a pine-tree shade of green. "Mommy, I just wanted to mix the colors," she said when she saw the particularly panicked look on my face.

Despite the excitement, everything turned out okay. No clothes were ruined, and the hands came clean after a super-long bath. Lily didn't get into too much trouble, but she knew she should have, especially since Mommy had explicitly told her not to touch the colors. This is one of those events that I wish I had pictures to share, but I didn't want to reinforce bad behavior by urging the little one to smile for the camera....

The Little Valentine Writer

It's a little bragging today.... Over the past couple of days, Lily wrote all of the Valentine cards for her classmates. She insisted on doing all of the cards herself, and she wouldn't let me do anything beyond tell her how to spell the names of her friends. While I was initially impressed that she wrote all of the cards herself, I was even more impressed when she came home from school with a stack of Valentine cards from her classmates -- cards all written and signed by Mommies (or Daddies). I'm proud of my little writer....