It's a call from "Home Kids."
I answer and on the other end is my nine year old, Cali.
"Hi, Mom!"
"Hi, Cali."
"Where are the cupcake papers?"
"The paper cups you bake them in?"
"Yeah."
"Are you making cupcakes?"
"Yeah."
"I'll be home in an hour, how about you wait until I get there and can help you?"
*Silence*
"Or is there a sister there that can help you?"
"West is here."
I have to take five seconds to go over this in my head. She's never baked on her own before.
"If you have any questions about what to do please ask him for help."
"Okay. It's not hard, Mom, the directions are right on the back. I got this."
"Okay... the cupcake papers are in the cupboard where the sugar is."
"Okay! Thanks, Mom!"
I get home about an hour later and the house smells good, like baking, but not like cupcakes. More like...
"Are these blueberry muffins?"
I peer closely at them, still nestled in their papers inside the muffin tin, sitting on the stove top. They look really pale and the middles are decidedly under cooked and a bit gooey looking. Though the batch in the pan next too it looks alright.
West begins to tell me the story from his end of the happenings.
Cali did indeed decide she was going to bake. She found a package of "just add water" muffin mix in the cupboard that I had recently bought on a whim and had decided that it was exactly what the day was calling for.
She read the directions and managed to get the right amount of water mixed in with powder.
West is vaguely aware that she's making something. He's sitting on the couch and Cali comes and perches herself next to him. A few short minutes go by and the timer goes off. Cali disappears into the kitchen where she cracks the oven to check things out, resets the timer and perches herself on the couch again.
A few short minutes later the timer goes off again. Cali disappears into the kitchen where she cracks the oven to check things out, resets the timer, and perches herself on the couch again.
This goes on a few more times when The Man finally asks her what's going on.
Cali states that the directions said the muffins would only take two to three minutes to cook, but they still weren't cooked yet.
At hearing this I interrupt with, "Two or three minutes? There's no way."
The Man smiles and says, "I know, that's what I was thinking too."
So he gets up and goes into the kitchen with Cali where, even by now the muffins should have been done because she'd reset the timer several times already and time enough had gone by for them to be baked.
He cracks the oven and there the muffins sat, as cold and gooey as ever.
She'd never turned the oven on.
As it turns out she read the mixing directions very carefully, but when it came to the directions for actually baking them, she'd only glanced. She quickly picked up on "two to three minutes" and figured that was the all she needed to know and stuck the muffins into a cold oven and set the timer for her two minutes.
"Two to three minutes" was the time suggested for cooling after it came out of the oven, at the very end of the paragraph explaining oven temperature and actual baking time. You know, the part she decided to skip over.
With the oven now turned on and Dad there to help the second batch came out much better than the first.
And Cali has now learned that if there's a paragraph there, perhaps she ought to read more than the last sentence.
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