Dinosaur Disaster

Those of you who are loyal blog followers may remember the red play-dough incident of 2011, where I had quite a time trying to make homemade play-dough for Luke's preschool class.  Well, we may have topped that one with what is now referred to as the Great Dinosaur Disaster of 2012. 

 

Today is Luke’s VIP (Very Important Preschooler) Day at school.  He gets to be line leader, the teacher’s helper, brings in snack, and shares a “Me” bag of his favorite items from home with his class for his own private show-and-tell.  I wanted Luke’s snack to be special and unique, and had the brilliant idea to make Green Dinosaur Rice Krispie treats.  Modeled after the heart-shaped pink Rice-Krispie treats that we shared with Luke’s preschool class last year for Valentine’s Day, I thought this project would be pretty simple.  We even have a stegosaurus-shaped cookie cutter that is perfect for this snack idea.

Enter the complications:  2 sick children with fevers the day before VIP day.   For awhile it was touch and go whether or not Luke would even make it to school.  He would have been DEVASTATED to miss his special day of honor and I’m honestly not sure I could have handled his disappointment.  But after a day of rest at home yesterday, all systems were a go for Luke’s return to school. 

 

After a VERY early 4:10 a.m. start to the day on Wednesday from one sick preschooler and an unplanned afternoon trip to the grocery store with two snotty, miserable children in tow (to buy the ingredients for the snack),  an exhausted Mama started making the Rice-Krispie treats after the kids were finally tucked into bed last night.   I mixed together the margarine and marshmallows, added the green food coloring, and stirred in the Rice Krispies.  My fleeting thought was, “Hmm, this doesn’t look as green as I had imagined…” but I kept persevering.  I rolled out the sticky mixture and began cutting out the treats into dinosaur shapes using my cookie cutter, but somehow they looked like amorphous, moldy blobs.  And the greenish tint was now beginning to resemble blue cheese.  A faint sense of panic welled up in my chest as I realized I didn’t have a back-up plan.  I called Mark over to look at my creations:

 

 

“What do you think?”  I asked him.

“What are they supposed to be?”  Mark cautiously inquired. 

“Green dinosaurs, of course…” I wailed.

“Um, No,” he replied.  “You can’t serve those to children.   They don’t look right.” 

My worst suspicions were confirmed.  Reaching for my inner Martha Stewart, I tried to salvage the situation.  We grabbed leaf-shaped cookie cutters and attempted to transform the treats into “trees”, which was a no-go.  We even got out our Lightning McQueen pancake mold in hopes that we could make some sort of race car shape, which was equally disastrous. 

 “What would MARTHA do?”  I shrieked.  I glanced at the clock.  How in the world was I going to figure out another snack in the middle of the night before VIP day?  Should I start making sugar cookie dough from scratch and stay up all night baking stegosaurus-shaped cookies?

I surrendered to my failure and pulled out a jumbo snack sack of individual bags of (gasp) store-bought mini-pretzels.  This would go along with the cut-up apple slices that we were bringing for the class, too.  I climbed into bed, weary from my long day, and praying that Luke wouldn’t remember that I had promised that his VIP snack would be special green dinosaurs.

As we walked into school today, I told him, “Buddy, we have apples AND pretzels for your friends.  Isn’t that exciting?”

And my precious little man looked up at me with big eyes and said, “Mommy, everyone will LOVE them.  Those are 2 of my favorite things!”

And I thanked my lucky stars for the gift of earnest, sweet little boys who know exactly what their Mamas need to hear, and for a wonderful little company called Snyders of Hanover.