Sade the super scientist...
There are some days when I can nominate myself for ‘Mother of the Year Award.’ Like the time I singlehandedly prepped a space alien themed birthday party for my son. Complete with moon cake, alien face painting, wrap aunty Pele up in toilet paper ( aka a space mummy) and various other delights. Or like the time both my children won ‘Best Costume’ awards for Book Parade because I stayed up all night making a Snow Queen outfit for one and a Dementor from Harry Potter costume for the other. Or the time I virtuously dug, weeded, planted and watered a vegetable garden with my children so they would ‘learn the meaning of work’ and ‘enjoy the beauties of nature’ and then 100 plus cabbages all grew at once and we were drowning in the darn things and I never wanted to look at another green leafy plant again let alone eat one.
Okay, I could go on for ages talking about how wonderful a mother I can be. But let’s cut to the chase, shall we…On Friday, I definitely did NOT win any mother awards. Big daughter has been harassing me for 2 weeks about her science fair project. She wanted to enter the Fair and her group wanted me to teach them how to make oatmeal soap. In a blender. Which they would then present as a wonderful solution for teenagers fighting acne – natural and cheaper than Clearasil. Quick and easy too. But I didn’t want to teach her friends how to make soap. I was busy with very important things. Like going to watch ‘Eclipse’ 3 times. And writing my trashy romance novel ( which is coming along quite nicely if anyones interested) And running twice a day because Im training for a 102 km relay. So anyway, I kept procrastinating the whole thing. Finally, on the absolute last day of the holidays I couldn’t put it off any longer. I called the mothers of the friends and arranged for them to come over. I assured them we would be doing extremely important things. Like lighting the spark of the physicists and chemists of the future. I drove and picked them all up. I set up all my equipment in the kitchen. And then – I froze. You see, I haven’t actually made soap in a blender for almost 2 years. Not only has our soapmaking method changed ( to making huge buckets of it using a power drill) but also, Darren has taken over the soapmaking so I don’t actually make any soap at all anymore. (You think I would have thought of these things BEFORE I had the girls over). So there I was with these eager, expectant young women watching me, waiting for me to reveal the secrets of the soap universe to them. I had the recipe but I couldn’t remember what went in first and in what order - quite a vital point for soapmaking because if you mess it up, the mix has a tendency to blow up in your face. And then the scale acted up and wouldn’t weigh things properly. And then the blender jammed and spat at me. And then the first lot of soap we made looked like chemical waste. And to top it all off, as I was washing out the chemical waste from the blender, I dropped it and it smashed into pieces.
And still their eager faces were expectant and cheerful. And so I tried calling Darren “ can you please come home and show these girls how to make soap?” He was not impressed. He was knee deep in concrete, sweating buckets in the sun and supervising a team of 24 men as they poured the foundations for a warehouse. He politely told me to (ahem) go figure it out myself and please don’t call him with such frivolous things again. Still the girls were waiting for me. I had to save myself somehow. So I gave them a bag of cookies, a bag of chips, some sodas, and told them to go play Wii and Xbox in the room.
I took them all home late that afternoon. I’m pretty sure they had a great time and hopefully, they are even going to think Sade has a really funny, cool, nice mum. ( I kept giving them more snacks all day) But did we make soap? No. And did Sade enter the science fair like she wanted to? No. We read in the newspaper yesterday that a girl from Samoa College made a car go using vegetable oil. WOW. I said to Sade – see, I don’t think we could have competed against a vegetable-oil-powered-car anyway darling!? She just sighed. “I really wanted to go to the science fair.” ( Stab a dagger straight in the bad mothers heart there…)
So, this week, I am nominating myself for ‘Worst Mother of the Year’. And years from now, when Sade is NOT a Nobel Prize winning scientist, it will be because she didn’t get to make oatmeal soap in a blender when she was 12.
Okay, I could go on for ages talking about how wonderful a mother I can be. But let’s cut to the chase, shall we…On Friday, I definitely did NOT win any mother awards. Big daughter has been harassing me for 2 weeks about her science fair project. She wanted to enter the Fair and her group wanted me to teach them how to make oatmeal soap. In a blender. Which they would then present as a wonderful solution for teenagers fighting acne – natural and cheaper than Clearasil. Quick and easy too. But I didn’t want to teach her friends how to make soap. I was busy with very important things. Like going to watch ‘Eclipse’ 3 times. And writing my trashy romance novel ( which is coming along quite nicely if anyones interested) And running twice a day because Im training for a 102 km relay. So anyway, I kept procrastinating the whole thing. Finally, on the absolute last day of the holidays I couldn’t put it off any longer. I called the mothers of the friends and arranged for them to come over. I assured them we would be doing extremely important things. Like lighting the spark of the physicists and chemists of the future. I drove and picked them all up. I set up all my equipment in the kitchen. And then – I froze. You see, I haven’t actually made soap in a blender for almost 2 years. Not only has our soapmaking method changed ( to making huge buckets of it using a power drill) but also, Darren has taken over the soapmaking so I don’t actually make any soap at all anymore. (You think I would have thought of these things BEFORE I had the girls over). So there I was with these eager, expectant young women watching me, waiting for me to reveal the secrets of the soap universe to them. I had the recipe but I couldn’t remember what went in first and in what order - quite a vital point for soapmaking because if you mess it up, the mix has a tendency to blow up in your face. And then the scale acted up and wouldn’t weigh things properly. And then the blender jammed and spat at me. And then the first lot of soap we made looked like chemical waste. And to top it all off, as I was washing out the chemical waste from the blender, I dropped it and it smashed into pieces.
And still their eager faces were expectant and cheerful. And so I tried calling Darren “ can you please come home and show these girls how to make soap?” He was not impressed. He was knee deep in concrete, sweating buckets in the sun and supervising a team of 24 men as they poured the foundations for a warehouse. He politely told me to (ahem) go figure it out myself and please don’t call him with such frivolous things again. Still the girls were waiting for me. I had to save myself somehow. So I gave them a bag of cookies, a bag of chips, some sodas, and told them to go play Wii and Xbox in the room.
I took them all home late that afternoon. I’m pretty sure they had a great time and hopefully, they are even going to think Sade has a really funny, cool, nice mum. ( I kept giving them more snacks all day) But did we make soap? No. And did Sade enter the science fair like she wanted to? No. We read in the newspaper yesterday that a girl from Samoa College made a car go using vegetable oil. WOW. I said to Sade – see, I don’t think we could have competed against a vegetable-oil-powered-car anyway darling!? She just sighed. “I really wanted to go to the science fair.” ( Stab a dagger straight in the bad mothers heart there…)
So, this week, I am nominating myself for ‘Worst Mother of the Year’. And years from now, when Sade is NOT a Nobel Prize winning scientist, it will be because she didn’t get to make oatmeal soap in a blender when she was 12.