Hot Choculater

Can you see a problem here?

Is there anything more relaxing than sitting down to a hot chocolate on a wet winter’s evening? It’s the perfect end to a day and preparation for a good night’s sleep. Usually.

With the miserable weather most of this weekend, we’ve spent a good percentage of the time cooking and playing board games with the kids.

Boggle was the clear favourite, and a new entrant into the gaming stakes for our three middle children. It’s place on the top of the pedestal was assured from the first game when all three kids managed to pick out the word POO from the random letters – the subsequent giggle-fest lasted well into the morning.

Tonight I decided to treat the kids to a hot chocolate while we sat around the dining table waiting for bedtime.

“But we’ve brushed our teeth!” said Miss6. From the expression on her face, clearly the idea of eating or drinking something after your teeth have been cleaned had never occurred to her.

“Well I guess you’ll just have to brush them again,” I suggested.

“That is a great idea!” Miss6 shouted.

How about now?

So I pulled the Aldi coffee machine out of the cupboard and set it up, then I went looking for the jar of capsules left over from before I won the Gloria Jeans machine.

“Tracey!” I called out to my wife, who was working in her studio (bedroom). “Did you throw the hot chocolate capsules out?”

“They’re in the pantry,” she called back.

“I’m in the pantry.”

“Then they’re right in front of you.”

When we first started living together, this conversation could have gone on for fifteen minutes. However, fifteen odd years have passed since then so even as Tracey was saying this she was already up and walking into the kitchen.

“If they were right in front of me I’d…thank you.”

She’d reached in past me and moved the olive oil an inch to the right.

While Tracey continued through the kitchen I grabbed out the capsules and started warming the milk.

“Do you want one?” I asked my wife as she came back into the kitchen on the way through to her studio.

“No thanks,” she said. Then she stopped dead in her tracks. “What are you doing?”

“Making hot chocolate for the kids.”

Only I wasn’t, was I.

“I think,” said Tracey, “you better take another look at the capsules.”

A bit closer, and I’ll spin it around to make it easier to read.

Turns out I was about to feed one of my kids a cup of coffee.

Judging by the order of cups and capsules, it seems likely Miss3 would have been keeping us company. Which, as I explained to Tracey, would have been nice. We never get enough one on one time with her.

“Mistakes like that are dangerous,” Tracey scolded me.

“It just would have been a bad night,” I said. I doubt she’d have had more than a sip. No kid worth their salt could mistake coffee for chocolate. “She’d have been fine.”

“I don’t mean her,” said Tracey. “She’d be alright. I’m talking about your life being in danger. We both know you’d have gone to sleep and I’d have had to stay up with her and smother you with a pillow.”

On a related matter, for the foreseeable future, or at least until I get my eyes tested again, Tracey has put herself in charge of making hot chocolates for the kids. I seconded the decision.

 

When not typing away over here and checking his stats every two minutes

Bruce Devereaux hangs out at his ‘BIG FAMILY little income’  Facebook Page.

 ’raising a family on little more than laughs’

7 Comments

  • Can I just add – I’d like to think I would have noticed when I came to putting the pods in the machine 🙂 Not a given or anything, but possible….

  • Yeah of course you would’ve noticed. Or at least when it was made the smell would’ve been a dead giveaway. And then if you still gave to the littleun, then a smothering would be in order.
    I hear good things about those machines.

  • Miss two was exhausted on friday night and with everyone heading out and mm going to work i was working on dinner baths and early bed times so i could relax. My son poured me a huge glass of pepsi as i wizzed around the kitchen in my last minute prep for a night of nothing. His lift arrived and i waved him out the door. I walked back to miss two on the bench holding an empty glass. Eleven thirty the little monster screeched her final protest when i resorted to putting my leg on top of her to stop her wriggling off the couch for the nine hundreth time. It was just freakin awesome…

  • A friend of mine had just moved to Japan for her husbands work. One day she was out and about with her toddler in the pram. She saw a vending machine with drinks and bought her son a popper of strawberry milk. As she was walking around she was getting some strange looks from passers by but thought it was just because of her blond hair. Eventually someone stopped her and asked her why she was giving her toddler a strawberry daiquiri!!! Needless to say the boy was asleep before they got home! Only Japan would have alcohol in vending machines- awesome country 🙂 I think a bit of coffee is just fine in comparison!

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