Rice Cakes

Most parents are pretty naive when it comes to their kids. They live under the false assumption that they need to buy their kids toys in order to raise happy, well-adjusted children. Deep down inside, they probably know that they are wrong, but that doesn't seem to stop them from buying one more toy. 

At only two years old, our daughter, Elliana, already knows how unnecessary it is to spend money on toys. She doesn't need fancy games or dolls. She can make a toy out of things that are already laying around the house. As a matter of fact, a few days ago she made a tactile learning environment out of some very basic ingredients. 

I was sitting in the living room talking to my wife when we got suspicious. "What's Ellie up to?" Mommy asked. 

"I don't know, she's around somewhere," I said. 

"I'm going to go find her. She's probably getting into something," Mommy replied. Ten seconds later I heard a voice in the kitchen saying, "Oh no! You have to come look at this."

"Should I bring a camera?" I asked. 

"No, just come look." When I arrived Ellie was sitting in the pantry happily playing. On the bottom shelf we have two large matching containers. One has rice and the other is full of flour. Ellie was scooping the rice out and putting it into the flour. Then she scooped flour out and put it into the rice. 

Fortunately the containers are clear so we could see the extent of the damage by looking through the sides. It looked like the flour had worked its way through the top two inches of the rice, so Mommy scooped that part out. The flour container just looked like it had rice on top and was not mixed in, so that was a relatively easy fix as well. We thought. 

The next day I made pancakes for breakfast. As I was chewing my first bite, something a little crunchy and a little chewy got stuck in my tooth. At first I thought it was a chunk of syrup that had dried on the lip of the bottle and fallen onto my pancake. Then I looked up and saw a strange look on Mommy's face. "Is there something crunchy in your pancake?" I asked.

"Yeah, what is it?" she asked back. 

"I have something crunchy in mine," Zach said fishing around for it with his tongue. A second later he spit out a small white chunk. "Rice?" 

"Why is there rice in our pancakes?" Maddie asked.

"I think I know," I said. Apparently Ellie's little hands-on experiment had caused the rice to infiltrate the flour a little more deeply than we had thought. The good news, though, is that when we had rice for dinner, at least it was flour-free.