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!

Docs Earn Their Money

. . this time anyway, we came away from the doctor's office not feeling like we'd been totally jobbed. The last few times we've taken either of the kids to the doctor we were sent away empty-handed, so to speak. You take them in because you can just sense or tell that something's not right, only to be told there's nothing that can be done. Except of course for emptying your bank account. That's the one thing the folks in the medical field can always fall back on if you have complaints about your care. "Well, we did take all of your money, so you can't accuse us of not doing anything." Touche.

But yesterday was different. We took Lily in to see if we could get to the bottom of the diarrhea issue you no doubt remember from an earlier post. When the doctor told me that kids often develop a temporary lactose intolerance when fighting a common stomach virus I felt like she had earned her money. No more cheese and yogurt, no more explosive poops! YES!!! Then, as we always said in the restaurant business, she went above and beyond the call of duty to really provide value for the customer . . me.

Upon inspection of Lil's ears the doc discovered not one but two nasty ear infections. Huh? Would that explain her recent tendency to shout "WHAT?" whenever anyone spoke in her general direction? Is that why she'd been feverish? Did the bad cough and runny nose she had a week and a half ago cause the ear infections? Has she been wanting to snuggle a lot because she wasn't feeling well? According to the doc, "Maybe, yes, probably, and it's difficult to say." Well you know what, I'm thrilled with one affirmative, two educated guesses and one coin flip. That's a thousand-percent improvement from our last visit, and we even got to go get a prescription filled for our troubles! Twenty minutes of wandering aimlessly around the grocery store waiting for the uber-pharmacist to put our yummy orange-liquid antibiotics back into their original containers was a small price to pay for such medical satisfaction. We're currently on dose number two of said orange-flavored goodness, and hopefully it will have done its work by this weekend. There's nothing I dread more than a sick, cranky, irritable Lily confined to a small space with lots of family members for 3 days. Oh well, cross your fingers!