Ms. Sassafrass and I have been having a delightful time together since she has started staying with me four mornings a week. She is three years old, the youngest of our grandchildren, but being the youngest has given her the advantage of being wise beyond her tender years.
She is blonde and blue eyed, which is quite a contrast for this Hawaiian, American Indian, Irish mixed clan of dark hair and dark brown eyes, but we still claim her. Her sprinkling of freckles across her nose gives her an impish look but when she speaks with her not quite articulated English, her voice is deep and raspy. It's rather like having a miniature Mae West/Jennifer Coolidge, as Sophie on 2 Broke Girls, in the house.
Every once in a while, Sassafrass has a tendency for her head to spin, but those episodes are getting fewer and further between ever since the creation of the "sparkle bottle". The sparkle bottle is a 16 oz. clear plastic bottle filled with water, a couple bottles of clear glue and silver, pink and purple glitter. Once it is shaken, the glitter twirls and swirls for several minutes before it settles back to the bottom. The purpose of the sparkle bottle is to provide an unruly child with something to focus on while in time out. I use it when I see a crying fit coming on and it has proven to be a most valuable tool. Before reaching for the bottle, I do ask if she needs bopped with it.
One day, at lunch time, the sparkle bottle was sitting on the table and Papa asked her if he could have a drink of her tasty water. Ms. Sassafrass giggled and said, "Dat not tasty water."
"It's not?" Papa asked in mock surprise.
"No silly, it's to keep me from cwyin'."
And so it has.
She is also a great helper. I give her jobs to do, while I'm working in my jewelry business studio and it gives her an enormous amount of satisfaction. Hopefully the child labor people won't be knocking at my door any time soon. There is absolutely nothing wrong with teaching a child how to do a job.
She helps in the kitchen too, when it's time to fix her lunch. I have discovered in order to get her out the door for pre-school at 12:15, lunch needs to start about 11:20. She talks a lot, but she also likes to graze. There's no hurry-up when it comes to this child eating. One day I set a dozen eggs and a bowl in front of her and told her I needed 3 eggs cracked in the bowl. Her eyes were as big as saucers when she asked me "I can do it?" I told her to go for it and she cracked them like a pro.
Now we start lunch time playing restaurant. I grab my imaginary order pad and pen and read off the day's special to her. Ramen noodles are a staple of this child's cuisine and are on the special just about daily. She loves this game and listens intently while she giggles and nods her head in approval of the choices. One day she informed me that I had 'fogot' to ask her if she wanted any tasty water.
Yesterday, while the hopefully last blast of winter cold and snow was blowing past the windows, I decided to plan ahead for warmer weather. I had purchased a small bag of organic potting soil because I wanted to try and start a couple of plants indoors. After scrapping a project of making starter pots out of newspapers, I remembered I had some pre-made paper pots in the basement.
I did this project in the kitchen, probably not the best place to open a bag of really dry organic potting soil. Right off the bat, I had this stuff everywhere. I filled six paper pots with the mixture, placed the seeds in each one and put the pots in a 6 hole muffin tin.
Recently I have been doing more baking than usual. A couple of days ago, while going through the cabinet that houses baking apparatuses, I stumbled upon my muffin tins. They obviously hadn't been used for a decade or two because they were rusty. That's when I decided to use one for a potting plant tray.
I watered each paper pot and placed the tray on a corner table that has a southerly and eastern exposure and is home to many of my house plants. It wasn't long before I could hear water dripping on the floor so I walked over to see what was going on. The water had gone straight to the bottom of the pots, ran out the drain hole, filled up the muffin compartment and leaked all over the table until it found some gravitational pull to the floor.
I took this dripping mess back across the kitchen, to the area that looked like someone must have poured organic potting soil all over the counter and try to figure out what went wrong.
Little did I know, there were directions on how to use the potting soil. Seriously? I've been using potting soil for years, granted, not in the kitchen, and I've never had to read the directions for its use. Sure enough, I was supposed to wet the soil first with lukewarm water.
It was a blizzard outside and I wasn't going to trudge through the snow in search of a bucket. I grab the biggest mixing bowl I can find, dig the seeds out of the not wet but extremely messy potting soil, dump the soil in the bowl and add the water. Mix until damp, the directions said. So I mixed until damp and then stuffed the soil back into the pots, replanted the seeds and placed the muffin tin back on the house plant table.
The kitchen looked like Farmer Joe had just driven through with his tractor and freshly used plow. I should have waited one more day. Ms. Sassafrass would have enjoyed making today's special:
Mud Pies.
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