A Night with Creative Kids

Ever since Ginger Girl and I saw a mashed potato bar on one of the wedding shows we watch, she's been wanting to do the same thing. For the last few weeks she has wanted to do this but for various reasons it just didn't work out until last night. 

Mind you, it's not just any mashed potato bar. 

It's mashed potatoes served in wine glasses. Of course, right? Cuz every parent totally wants to watch their kids handle their wine glasses with sweaty, ungraceful kid hands clinking silverware against it. But I live by what my Grandma J. lived by. What occasion is more special than getting to eat with your family? It's why I serve every meal on my antique china. I'd rather enjoy using it at the most special of occasions, every meal with my family, than save it for some far-off date with other people. 

Cheers!

Those peas are from our garden, by the way. 

Our server & dinner-thinker-upper.

Gnger Girl dished up everyone's choice of chive or cheddar cheese mashed potatoes. They could top them with any or all of the yummy goodness: bacon (yum), cheese, peas, onion, black beans, and gravy. We also had cucumbers with homemade dressing--Little Blondie's request because it's her favorite vegetable and her favorite way to have them is how I make them--and a salad with various lettuces, various kinds of tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, onion, green pepper, and homemade warm bacon dressing. Every single vegetable came from our garden. Yum.

With every dinner, the kids are required to eat at least 2 servings of vegetables. I love that everyone goes nuts over our garden vegetables. I always see the kids taking seconds of their salad or green beans or squash and exclaiming over how good it is. I grew up with a large garden and my kids grew up with a large garden every summer as well. Even so, it never gets old for me to have kids that fight over the last helping of a vegetable and beg me to make whatever they just picked out of the garden.

Boy Teenager was a party pooper and refused to eat his potatoes out of the wine glass. He called it "stupid to scrape a fork of food around a wine glass." Butthead. He ate out of a bowl while the rest of us enjoyed our Fancy Dinner. 

Not like that, Little Blondie!

It was so much fun to work on a fun dinner with the kids. It didn't take any extra effort--it was the same amount of cooking as if we'd eaten on plates--& it made everyone feel "fancy" & "special" according to the kids. And of course it made Ginger Girl's night because it was her idea and everyone sans Boy Teenager thought it was a cool idea that they want to do again. Nothing like spicing up an otherwise normal evening at home. 

After the kids' jobs were done I took a break from homework to do something I never do. Nothing. I did nothing. Little Blondie had been really excited to do crafts with the new stuff I'd bought...in fact she had earned staying up late and extra TV time & she asked if she could stay up late to do crafts instead of watching TV. Say what? While she was doing that, I just sat there and talked to her. I didn't clean while I did it. I didn't fold laundry. I didn't answer emails. I didn't organize anything. I just sat there. 

So did Watson.

I'm such a paranoid Mother about certain things. Not the usual things that most other Moms freak out about...I have very select things that I'm paranoid about my kids getting severely, irrepairably hurt from and forever knowing that I let them do That One Thing so it's all my fault that they are suffering for eternity. Holy run-on sentence, Batman. 

Trampolines are one that I just cannot relax about. I will never relax around a trampoline and I will never look at one without visualizing crime scene tape and bodies drawn in chalk on the grass around it. 

I remember how I learned a boyfriend years ago had a trampoline. He watched the kids for a day while I worked and I walked into his house to be told, "I can't believe this was your kids' first time on a trampoline!" He let them jump on the trampoline and...well...we're not together anymore, are we? 

So...the hot glue gun is another of those things that I'm kinda slightly somewhat over protective about. Not that I picture their necks snapping or finding their body on the ground in unrecognizable, non-human forms from using one like with a trampoline, but...BURNS. The burns! The burns! 

I finally relaxed enough to let Little Blondie use the glue gun last night. With multiple instructions on how to hold it so you don't touch the hot part, how to not touch the glue before it's set because it's hot, how to not touch the strings coming off of it for the first couple seconds becaue they're hot...

Crafts, ice cream, &
staying up late.
Her dream come true.

"How happy are you to be able
to use the glue gun yourself?"

Nemo wanted to help.

A night chillin' with my creative kids. I'll take this any time.