A Baking Fail, A Mom Win and A Bunny Named Josiah

It was more of a mom fail, really, if you saw my attitude and impatience during the whole thing.

My 12 year old came home yesterday with, "Oh, yeah, it's our potluck tomorrow - I have to take something from New Zealand."  What?  Sean & I had to go out to our hospital tour, so I had an hour that I could help, but no time to shop if we didn't already have the ingredients...  She found a traditional meringue cake called Pavlova that I was skeptical about - to my mind, it looked not quite simple enough for her to pull off on a first try.  But I told her to pull out all the ingredients and after supper we'd give it a shot.  I just coached - she did it all herself.  It may have been the bit of yolk in the egg whites, it may have been the blended too fine sugar, it may have been the imprecise measuring, but it ended up a nice flat meringue layer instead of a big glorious puff.  This morning she broke it up into cookie size pieces and took the cool whip and kiwis to top it with... If worse comes to worse, she'll just cut up and serve the kiwis solo.

Part of what made this a stress was that she also asked if we could make something for her friend, J, who's mom was catering a wedding and would be busy in their kitchen and not able to help her make something for the potluck.  They each did a report on a different country and had to bring food from that country for their potluck today.  I didn't promise anything, but we found and printed out a recipe for Icelandic Pepper Cookies - "a recipe made in every home in Iceland at Christmas!"  M's recipe used all the eggs, but on the way home from our outing, we stopped and I got some eggs and I made the dough - here's where the mom win comes in.  I don't even know for sure if her friend ended up coming up with something, but on the chance that J would have to miss out on the potluck, I baked the pepper cookies.  I was glad they had to be in the fridge overnight - I had more energy for baking this morning than I did  last night.  So this morning I baked them all up, and M got her stuff for plan A and plan B packed, and everyone's happy.  We also had apologized to each other last night for our attitude fails, which was a good thing. 

*****

Out my window at work this fall I've noticed a fair sized divot in the grass.  Then I began to see a rabbit lying in it sporadically.  This week, with the snow, he's been there quite a bit.  I told Peggy (our secretary) on Tuesday that if he was back tomorrow, he was getting a name.  And so yesterday, my friendly neighborhood bunny was christened Josiah.  I chose that because I am currently reading through 2 Kings, and had just got to the end of a long list of king fails and up comes Josiah, a boy who became king at age 8.  He was good and led his people in God's ways - even though he was small, he made a big difference.  I thought Josiah would be a great name for my little bunny friend.  I wonder if I'll see him today?

Now I'm off to do a third trimester workout video before I head to work.  Have a great day!