I did it. Again.

Well, dear readers, I did it again.
I had another culinary tragedy.
You'd think that, based on simple odds, I've experienced more of those in my lifetime than a normal human should be subjected to, but apparently there are no rules of fairness where things like this are concerned.
I was even doing a good deed when it happened, but apparently that didn't help anything either.

See, I had called Elizabeth McCauley.
For those of you who have not had the extreme pleasure of meeting Elizabeth, (you would remember it if you had. Trust me.) perhaps her nicknames would best describe her -- two of my favorites are "Bubbly" and "Firecracker" which seem so synonymous with her personality that they feel natural to use as proper nouns.

On this particular morning, I had decided to multitask: call Elizabeth while making breadsticks for dinner (we were having lasagna--and what is lasagna without fresh bread? [Lasagna, you say, but that's beside the point.]) We were deeply engrossed in an edifying conversation concerning Google Reader when I used one of my God-given senses (i.e. smell) to determine that my breadsticks were ready to come out of the oven. Balancing my cell phone on my shoulder, I got a towel in my hand, deftly opened the oven door, and pulled the pan of breasticks out.
I admit, I impressed myself.

That is, until the whole pan went flying.

I maintain that it must have been some sort of conspiracy. I mean, it sounds perfectly safe to pull a large, heavy pan out of the oven with one hand and a kitchen towel, right?
Right?
The next thing anybody heard was my frantic, "Mooooooooooom!"
My mom is always good at rescuing me. Before I could hang up with Elizabeth, she practically had the whole thing cleaned up and had a bucket of water cleaning up the garlic and parmesean cheese remnants from the kitchen floor.
(Yes, of course the breasticks all landed upside-down.)


In cheerier--much cheerier--news, yesterday my mom had the extremely helpful idea of going into our storage shed (in the backyard) and getting out all of the costumes that Jay and I used to wear as children.
You're probably wondering: what costumes?
Well, see, we have this very creative mom, who, unlike her daughter, is a domestic wonder and who can randomly wake up one morning (probably before 5:00 a.m., too) and decide to do something like, oh, say, design and execute the production of a lion costume.
Yes. You read that right.
Lion costume!
Or rabbit, or squirrel, or Moses-in-Egypt, or Laura Ingalls, or anything else she sets her heart on. When we were kids, all we had to do was:

a. come up with an educational reason why we needed to have such-and-such costume
b. sort the laundry and sweep the kitchen floor, plus any other bribery tactics that seemed appropriate at the time
c. watch mom make the costume
d. use
e. repeat next time we wanted a costume made

By this method, we acquired quite a collection of very creative costumes when I was young. And, now that Daniel and Mally are into their years of formal education, my mom doesn't need to make costumes, she can simply go out to the shed and get them.

Today was the day they came out of the shed. And as soon as they came out, my mom promptly disappeared on a trip to every grocery store, bank, and other retail establishment within, oh, say, a dozen miles, and, since I don't like shopping, I stayed home.
But I'm sure she planned it that way, because when the little kids woke up from their naps, they spotted the infamous "costume bucket" in the living room, they mobbed me and wanted to try the costumes on.
I told them, "Actually, those are mom's special costumes. Wait until she gets home before you use them."
Ha.
So the kids waited, and once mom got home, we had a big costume-wearing party. Don't let Whitney's smile deceive you: she was terrified of the costumes. She takes after her big sister, I guess, because when I was a child, one of our neighbors, who was about 5'5" but seemed about as tall as Goliath came over in a large pink rabbit suit on Easter, intending to amuse me, and I screamed, pitched a fit, hollered for an unreasonable amount of time, and, I think, permenantly scared her off.
Come to think of it, in the years since, I've never actually seen her wear anything pink again. There has got to be some correlation there.

Anyway, Emily lined them up and took pictures, and they were just so cute that I had to post them for you.

And yes. Like I alluded to earlier in this post, my mom made all of these costumes. And there are lots, lots more where those came from.

Note: Apparently I have some technical difficulties with my links, as several of my pictures aren't showing up. I'll try to fix them when I figure out what the problem is. :-) Thanks!