How to Practice and Make Dinner

It all started with the drumset.

We've known for awhile that James enjoys banging on drumsets, but we found out this last week that the drumset has become a point of obsession. J and I played a recital at my school last week, and James threw the worst tantrum of his little life when he was plucked away from the drumset in the sanctuary afterwards. He kicked and flailed and shrieked as we carried him outside, twisting violently and trying to climb down. He's done this sort of thing before when something really upsets him, but we could both tell that this fit was unusual.

"James, that's enough!" said J, setting him down on the pavement.

This is when he'd usually calm down and start to forget about whatever it was that was upsetting him, maybe even coming over for a contrite snuggle. But this time he kept flailing on the pavement, and even tried to make his way back into the school when another adult came out through the big glass doors. He HAD to get back to that drumset. It took him nearly 20 minutes to calm down.

Yesterday, we visited Pax and Kylie for a bonfire, and James found the drumset in their basement. He had the same ecstatic smile the entire time he was beating the dusty old floor tom, and pitched a fit nearly as bad as "the Lima incident" when we took him up to put him in his pack and play for bed. Fortunately the dark room and the presence of Steven Bear sedated him relatively quickly, but there was no doubt that the drumset was the cause of the fit again.

I had two things to do this afternoon
1) Practice for at least an hour
2) Make dinner

J was gone at church for the evening, and I knew that it wouldn't be easy to get these two things done. James knew it was glorious outside, and he was begging to go out within 15 minutes of consciousness in the morning. (We did go outside in the morning, and had a blast playing the back yard...but no practicing was logged.)

I had an idea. About a month ago we'd finally retrieved (after six years of marriage) some old boxes that we'd thrown in a friends attic when we were first married. I remembered seeing an old set of drumsticks and a practice pad from J's percussion methods class. When James got up from his nap, I gave him a bottle, then took him into the laundry room to dig for the sticks. I found them right away, and set him up out in the kitchen. He couldn't have been more pleased. He beat away on the practice pad vigorously, and I set up to practice trumpet. Unlike the cacophony he can raise on a drumset (it's the cymbals that make it unbearable, really) a practice pad merely makes dull "thwump" sounds, and for 20 glorious minutes all was well as James and I both practiced our instruments.

At 4:30, it was time to make the pizza dough. I knew that tonight was a pizza night, and J had left a recipe for easy pizza dough that I could make in the bread machine. There would be no kneading, no dirty dishes, and no complications. All I had to do was follow the recipe and I'd have a fluffy golden crust that she'd made several times already to the approval of all parties. I pulled out the recipe card. One and a quarter cups of water. I measured the water out from the tap, and poured it in. Check. 2 tablespoons of yeast. I pulled the bag of yeast out of the freezer, dug the tablespoon out of the silverware drawer, and dumped in two scoops.

It looked like an awful lot of yeast. I looked at the card again, and noticed that it read "2 t yeast" but 1 1/2 T sugar. Oh, bother. I probably should have taken this as an omen and resigned myself to ordering a pizza, but I decided to try again. I washed out the bread machine bucket, and then started again, this time making sure that I apportioned the ingredients exactly as they were written.

Once I had everything ready I latched the bucket in place, turned the machine to setting 6, and pressed the start button. It gave a loud whir and then began to knead the dough. James, who is terrified of the noises that the bread machine makes, ran into the other room. After a few minutes his face peeked around the doorpost, and I asked him if he wanted to look at the bread machine. He gave a shy nod, and I picked him up. We opened up the top, looked in, and he surveyed the mass of wet dough.

"It looks good, James. We'll keep on checking on it though." We did have one previous failure with this recipe, when the bread machine failed to mix all of the flour into the dough, leaving dry flour all over the side of the pan. I resolved to check every 10 minutes or so and make sure it was mixing properly.

James was very helpful in all of this, and we both went back to practicing. We would check every few minutes, and he even asked to taste the dough that was on the spoon. I obliged (there was no egg in the recipe) and he nodded in approval. I asked if he wanted supper, and he nodded again. His supper was a disaster.

He's getting more particular about what he eats, and how he eats. Tonight, he only wanted to eat the cookies that Great-Grandma Davis had brought up from Pennsylvania earlier that day. I told him he'd have to eat the rice and beans that Mom had left for him first, and he absolutely refused. We went through ten minutes of my trying to force a spoon (then airplane, then missile, then outright bribe) into his mouth before he finally accepted some grapes. After the grapes were consumed I put some green beans on his tray, and he promptly threw them on the floor. (I found one in the bell of my C trumpet.)

I decided we'd had enough dinner at that point, so I wiped off his face and took him out of the high chair. As soon as I'd put him down I remembered--J told me to give him an avocado.

"James, do you want some avocado?"

He gave an enthusiastic nod "yes" and some goofy giggles, and I went to cut one up. When I turned around, he had climbed into the adult chair next to the table. When I picked him up to put him in his booster seat, he began to shriek. I set him back down in the big chair and looked at him wearily.

"James, will you eat this avocado if you can sit in a big person chair?"

Another happy nod. He wants to do "big kid" things now, including eating with his own spoon and fork. This makes a mess of everything, but we're trying to let him do it whenever we can. I let him sit in the big chair, and gave him avocado. He gobbled it up, begged unsuccessfully for a cookie, and then just as I was wiping him off, the bread machine timer sounded.

"Okay James, time to make a pizza!"

I set him down on the kitchen floor, walked over to the machine, and looked in.

It was a disaster.

My dough was a soupy mess, and there was no way it was going to form into a pizza crust. Again, I probably should have just ordered a pizza right there. But I didn't. I thought to myself: "I can salvage this--it just needs to be thicker! If I knead in enough flour, it will thicken up." I grabbed a fistful of flour, spread it on the counter, and then started to pull the soupy dough out on top of it. I realized as soon as I touched it that I should have taken my wedding ring off. I was immediately a sticky mess, and I was probably going to need more flour than the initial fistful.

I heard a crash behind me, and turned around to see that James was knocking over a stack of expensive Oxford texts in Greek, including my very expensive Vulgate Bible. I rushed over, both hands completely covered in sticky dough, and used my elbows to push the books away from him towards the center of the table. Running back to the kitchen counter, I somehow managed to get the the top off of the flour canister by picking it up with my elbows, and I reached my doughy hands in for more.

There were loud shrieks behind me. I turned around, and James was stuck attempting to get down from the chair. He was half hanging off of it, and clearly about to fall. I ran back to the table, leaving a cloud of flour in my way, and sat down in the chair opposite him, then lifted up my feet (my hands were a complete disaster now) and pincered his midsection between my ankles, leaning back to guide him down to the floor. He laughed uproariously at this, and I noticed that I'd spilled flour all over the Vulgate Bible as I hurried back to the kitchen counter.


I used the top of my hand to pull the cooking spray down from the kitchen cabinet, and resigned myself to getting the cap dirty in order to spray the pizza pan. (I got the pizza pan entirely by pulling the stove drawer open with my feet)

As I was putting the doughy mess onto the pizza pan I heard the distinct sound of a brass-nickel alloy falling onto the floor, and whirled around to see that James was pulling my trumpet apart and dropping the pieces on the floor. I'd heard him drop the third valve slide, and I was again pulling the trumpet away from him with my knees. I sat down again with the trumpet between my knees, slid it down to my feet, and somehow (really, this must have looked very impressive) with my doughy hands held safely away maneuvered it onto the table and out of James' reach with my ankle and toes.

As I walked back to the kitchen counter, I beheld the final state of the dough. It had firmed up a little bit, but it was full of uneven wet patches, badly stretched, and it barely covered up half the pizza pan. My shoulders drooped as I looked at it, and then I felt a tug at my shorts. James was standing next to me, and pointing at my fingers, which were still plastered in the dough. I held out my hand, and he licked my the dough off my middle finger. Looking up, he smiled.

"Is that good?" I asked

He nodded, and I offered him my thumb. He promptly bit it as hard as he could.


I attempted to salvage the dough by turning it into a calzone, although I completely forgot to put cheese on it until I was already in the process of putting it in the oven door, and once the cheese was on I just barely caught myself from baking it with a metal knife left on the pan accidentally. I also forgot to set the timer until it had already been in the oven for five minutes, and as I began to pile the dirty dishes in the sink, I looked back at my darling son.

He was trying to drink my valve oil.