At last!

Joshua can really do stuff. I've long dreamed of the day when my kids would be genuinely useful . . . I mean as more than someone on whom I can blame my messy house and scattered-brain. Today at Walmart, he got the BIG bag of cat food down for me, put it in the cart, and then loaded it in the car. I knew there was a reason I had boys.

Then we got home, and in an effort to divert his attention from the mire of self-pity in which he was wallowing because I forced him walk to over hot coals with his bare feet, I let him cook dinner for me. That's what you would have thought I made him do based on his level of self-pity, anyway. The truth, while far less dramatic, is that I would not let him ride his bicycle without a helmet. Yeah, I know, they should hang my picture in that weird torture museum in Rothenberg, Germany. (I'm not making that up; I've actually been there. It's a museum dedicated to all the different types of torture devices that have been used throughout the ages. Oddly, it did not include listening to my children play the trumpet.)

So, I thought I would distract Joshua from his woe-is-me routine by asking if he wanted to help me make some breadsticks for dinner. He ended up doing most of the mixing and the kneading. He set the timer for them to rise and then rolled out the dough when it was time to slice and bake them. I made my way into the Best Mommy Ever Hall of Fame by allowing him to use the huge 10 inch bread knife to cut the dough and then letting him use a pastry brush to "paint the butter" on. (He wanted garlic on his, but we didn't have any garlic powder, so we put minced garlic inside a folded sheet of wax paper, and he used a rolling pin to crush it. He was so impressed with my ingenuity, you would have thought I'd made a dinosaur come to life. I love that it doesn't take much to impress him yet. Heck, it doesn't take much to impress me, either, so I was pretty darn proud of that idea.)

After the breadsticks, I figured I may as well continue making use of my eager young lackey and let him make the filling for the stuffed shells. He did every bit of it . . . I didn't even give it a final stir. Once the shells were done, I asked if he wanted to fill them, and being Joshua, he wasn't content to just put the filling inside the shell the way normal folks do. He inverted the shells so that they made a cup shape, filled them that way, and pretended they were clams. (I think he meant oysters because the shape of them sort of resembled oysters on the half shell.)

At dinner, he and the others chopped up their pasta and noodles and mixed it together and called it saucee (pretend there's an accent mark over the first "e.")

Me: Why's it called saucay?
Josh: No, mom, saucee.
Me: That's what I said, saucee.
Josh: It's not a long "a" or a short "a." It's a short "a" with an "e."
Me: Saucee?
Josh: No, it's in between a long "a" and a short "a."
Me: Saucayee?
Josh: No! Saucee!
This went on for about 5 minutes before I apparently figured out how to make a vowel sound that's half long and half short.

All in all, it was a successful first meal for Joshua. Come back Thursday to hear how his lamb chops turn out.