Sometimes my kids do things that make me so stinking frustrated. Then in the midst of my anger, I realize that I did the same at their age. It is like all the Karma gods are laughing at me.
The other day I hauled a bag of rice down to the food storage closet in the basement and put it down a little too roughly and one of the seams ripped. Oh well--I put them in plastic pails anyway.
Along come my two youngest children. I see exactly what they are going to do as they are looking at the rice. I head them off with a stern "don't touch the rice!" I thought my scary voice would let them know how serious I was.
Didn't work. They dumped out the whole very large bag when I was upstairs, and proceeded to play in it--kinda like a sandbox. Sneaky boy blamed it all on Simone. "She said she was going to bite me if I didn't." Yeah right, the 25 lb two-year-old is not all that threatening these days.
I was so angry. I sent them both to their rooms. And just sat feeling sorry for myself and frustrated that my basement was covered in rice, regretting the next hour that would be spent trying to get it all up and my wasted $15.
But as I sat and explained to Jared how mad I was, a vision popped into my head. My two little sisters and me prying open cans of our mother's food storage wheat and putting our feet into the cans. Oh it felt so good! The sensory experience was wonderful. We pulled out handfuls of that wheat, and started throwing it everywhere. It was sprinkled on the lime green shag carpet remnants for months.
Then a few days after our basement had flooded, we went downstairs to find wheat growing in the light of one of the windows. The pale green shoots coming up in a thick rectangle. We laughed and thought that was so funny. And we never even got in trouble for it. I don't know who cleaned up the wheat grass.
I guess life has come full-circle and it was my turn to clean up the rice. Although I did make them help!
