Mother-Fail

A friend of ours introduced Nathan and I to "Fail Blog". The general concept is that people post up photos or video of when something, or someone, failed. For example, one entitled, "Towing Capacity Fail" showed a mini minor struggling to tow a caravan up hill, and then failing and rolling backwards down hill and crashing into a ditch beside the road. None-the-less, you understand the concept - something fails, and we find it amusing at someone else's expense. This is a concept I applied to myself last weekend (though I didn't find it amusing at the time, I am pretty sure Nathan did).

It was Saturday afternoon. I had a sick husband, a raucous almost-10-month-old son and defrosted mince meat (ground beef for the Americans). I decided I would make us a family-dinner of spaghetti bolognese. Good, comfort food for a sick husband, and perfect to share with Noah in his early stages of eating real food. After all, I had bought organic, whole wheat angel hair pasta for just this occasion.

An hour and a little later, Noah was sitting in his high chair protesting not being aloud to pull out all the Tupperware for the 100th time today and somewhat frustrated about the lack of food in front of him. Nathan was getting glasses of water for everyone, and I was about to strain the pasta and serve our family-dinner. I was, at this point, feeling very proud of myself. Not just because I had made dinner, and cleaned up the Tupperware for the 100th time, but I was looking forward to the 3 of us eating together, even if it was only 5:30 pm. As an added bonus all the ingredients in the dinner were organic, healthy, and delicious.

I grabbed the new white stainless steel strainer I had bought earlier that day in Wholefoods (the cheap plastic one tends to warp a little when I pour boiling water into it, something that was starting to concern me) and took the organic, whole wheat, angel hair pasta to the sink to strain.

Fail.

When one pours boiling water containing cooked organic, whole wheat, angel hair pasta into a stainless steel strainer, which one is holding in their bare hands, it gets very hot, very quickly. A few "pseudo-PG" words escaped my mouth, and I dropped the strainer, the saucepan and the organic, whole wheat, angel hair pasta into the sink.

"So? That doesn't sound like a mother-fail" you say. "Maybe not a perfect execution of pasta straining, but redeemable, right?"

Wrong. In my Super-Mother efforts this Saturday, I had also been cleaning up as I go, something my father would be proud of, and the sink was filled with dirty washing up water. Now it was filled with dirty washing-up water, a couple of left over dirty utensils, a strainer, a saucepan, a litre of boiling pasta water, and a packet of organic, whole wheat, angel hair pasta.

It was the straw that broke the camels back. Nathan had to take over. Cook some more non-organic, whole wheat, angel hair pasta for us - thankfully there was enough organic, whole wheat, angel hair pasta saved in the saucepan for Noah. And we did not manage to eat at the same time. In fact, Noah refused to eat the bolognese and the organic, whole wheat angel hair pasta altogether. He ate frozen peas, cheese and rice puffs, and smeared bolognese across the table whilst Nathan and I ate our non-organic substitute. Mother-fail.