When Good Ideas Go Bad

I made some muffins for the girls today for their afternoon snack, not because I really felt like baking (okay I know it's not really baking, but cut me a little slack) but because we're running the food supplies down before our trip this weekend and they were giving me more than a little bit of pushback about the Wheatables I was offering. As Lily sat down to eat her fresh-from-the-oven mini blueberry muffins she asked most politely for some juice. She typically doesn't drink juice, but since she'd been sick and I wanted her to get plenty of fluids I caved. Thinking I was saving myself from cleaning up huge messes later, I cut the corner off of the Capri Sun pouch and poured it into a cup for her.

There's a little bit of back-story here that I think is necessary for the full humor of the moment to be appreciated. Earlier Lily and I were talking about fruit as she was eating some Mandarin orange slices with her lunch. We went through the whole list of different fruits she liked, and when I could think of no more she looked at me and said "And I like donuts Daddy!" I almost died laughing, but I of course asked her why and she promptly replied "I like to dunk them." You'll understand why this is pertinent in a few minutes.

So there she sat, two muffins on a plate and a big-girl cup about half full of juice, and the look on her face was unmistakable. The wheels were obviously turning a mile a minute, and right away Lil looked at me for approval as she held the first muffin over the cup. "No", I told her, "that will be yucky." That was not the answer she wanted to hear, so I quickly caved in and gave her the old "Whatever, if you want to dunk it in the juice go right ahead." She stuck the muffin in the juice and took a little bite, and at first she seemed pleased with what she'd done. But , in the words of Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona, then the roof caved in. The muffin literally disintegrated the next time she dunked it, and the resulting tantrum looked like this:


Well, as funny as I found it, I had to make it stop. I assessed the situation and quickly remembered an old trick from the restaurant business. If you've ever ordered rare scotch or a really random fru-fru drink at a restaurant's bar you've probably been affected by this, although you probably didn't know it. Often times fruit flies would make their way into the bottoms of the bottles of the sweetest liquors. Bourbon, scotch, and anything that has 'creme de' in the name were the most common culprits, and instead of throwing the spirits away we would take it to the kitchen and pour the contents of the bottle through a coffee filter to remove the pests. Voila, ma'am, here's your Pink Squirrel. That'll be $6.75. But I digress . . so I grabbed Lily's juice and ran over to the sink. I poured the tainted juice through a sieve and into a new cup, and the crisis was over. I'll admit, I pulled an Emeril and said "Bam!" as I set it back down on the table. I actually think it was the loud noise, and not the clean juice, that snapped her out of the tantrum, but I suppose we'll never know. Suffice it to say, she did not continue dunking her muffins. Give her this, she learns from her mistakes, especially when they involve her snack!