“Maid for a Day”

I remember it like yesterday. Waiting for Mom’s “Country Woman” magazine to arrive in the mail. I would sit on the couch in our living room carefully reading the entire magazine from front to back. Making sure that I didn’t miss a single word or picture caption. We lived on a farm in North Dakota and our small town didn’t have much of a library, so a 6 year old’s reading options were limited to whatever books we had at home. Fortunately, my Mom loved to read as much as I did and besides a nice little collection of books, she had subscriptions to “Country Woman” and “Farm and Ranch”.

Each “Country Woman” would start out with an article featuring a farm woman and her wildly, over-the-top, floral festooned, country kitchen. I remember a lot of kitchens that also featured chickens and cows with an occasional vegetable theme here and there.

After that article there was one showing the winner of the monthly “Maid for a Day” contest. One lucky subscriber would win a maid to come clean her house while she lounged around drinking lemonade, eating cookies, and reading “Country Woman”.

Every month I would pray that my mom would be the lucky winner. Not for her sake, for mine. I never once thought that she would like a break from the endless house cleaning, cloth diaper washing, and garden weeding. I wanted a break. The thought of someone else vacuuming, dusting, and washing windows while I sat around eating and reading sounded like the most wonderful thing in the world to me. Of course, it never crossed my mind that I was sitting around reading instead of cleaning anyway.

Somehow my mom never won and I always secretly thought that the “Country Woman” people knew that we used cloth diapers and honestly, who wants to wash those?

Yesterday I was reminded of this memory when I was vacuuming and I realized that I finally had a solution. I have children!

Jackson was more than happy to be my “maid”. Tucker, on the other hand, represented a more accurate picture of my childhood self. Jackson even used the hose – something I’m not so good about doing.
That quickly moved to hosing his shirt


which quickly moved to hosing his hair.
Maybe I’ll wait a few more years before I let my “maid” help with the vacuuming again.

 

Irritation and SpongeBob

For Jackson’s birthday, I made him a SpongeBob cake. It didn’t go so well. Not being prepared probably had something to do with it. If I had only known that Jackson was going to have a birthday soon I would have made sure to get everything that I needed for his cake. But, no. I waited until the last minute.
Cuz that’s how I roll.
I made the cake the night before. No pictures were taken because I forgot. It was just a yellow cake mix prepared as a pound cake. I didn’t have any vanilla pudding mix, so I used butterscotch instead. It actually wasn’t that bad!
As you can see, I forgot to cut off the crumbs around the edges before I started working on the cake.
Here’s the assorted parts used on the cake. Fortunately, I only needed one or two of each item which meant that I was able to gorge on the rest of them while I worked on the cake. I did accidentally eat the part of the red Airhead that was supposed to be a sock stripe. I just rolled up a fruit rollup, slapped it on and no one was the wiser. I did a lot of haphazard slapping when it came to putting this cake together.
Don’t judge me-it would have turned out looking the same if I had been really careful instead.
Let’s just say that I was never one of your typical homeschoolers.
I dressed like one (read: denim jumper), acted like one, got pretty good grades like one, but when it came to creative and artistic genius; I was left in the dust.
I measured and marked wedges on two of the corners and then cut them off with a Tupperware knife. Have I ever mentioned how much I love Tupperware? Well, I do. We got the knife set from my mom’s sisters for our wedding and I don’t think I would be a complete person without them!

Then, I cut twolittleDebbies cakes in half for the arms and legs. I ate about 10 of them while I was doing this.

I added Twinkies to the arms and legs and then used the wedges that I had cut from the cakeforSpongeBob’s hands.

While I was frosting him, I forgot to look at the picture so there were some parts that had 3 different colors of frosting.

Then I got sick of taking pictures because it was an hour before the partywas supposed to start and I hadn’t even cleaned my bathrooms yet.