Sunday, February 24, 2008

Puffed Pancakes: My Undoing


It happened like this: As some of you may or may not know, I'm in nursing school. And I'm a mom. It's a bad combination (Do I *need* to say that?). My kids watch a little too much TV, because, even though I vowed to limit my studying to times when the kids are asleep (unless there was a dire and pressing deadline), it just hasn't been working out that way. And somehow (the chain of events is building here) the kids went from PBS kids to the hardcore stuff of Nick Jr and Cartoon Network and now we have TV commercials which really do eat into their brains in a bad way... The kids saw a commercial for some sort of now-only-19.95!!! puffed pancake pan. Now mix in an overly-indulgent grandma (go'bless her) and SUDDENLY there's a puffed pancake pan waiting for me when I got home from school. So, I figured: I make pancakes ALL THE TIME. We have pancakes for breakfast, lunch AND dinner 'round these parts. I can make pancakes with nothing more than a notion and a few ingredients and I don't even need the *right* ingredients: I'll improvise.

No. These things took me two hours. I was flipping 'em with skewers, burning my fingers on molten jam, cursing the TV, grandma, the puffed pancake pan, my husband. The first two batches came out burnt. The next two were anemic and probably unsafe for human consumption (those were the ones I ate) and then - voila! - got it. I serve them to the kids and my son (go'bless him) said, "Ew. These are yucky." Great. So I says to my husband, I says: "I need to quit nursing school." And he says (go'bless him): "Maybe you should quit exotic baking projects instead." Exotic? They're pancakes!

And, well, here's the fun part of the story. I have my pediatric midterm tomorrow and am I studying? No. I'm making puffed pancakes and writing in my blog. See, that's fun, right? And tomorrow is shaping into a 14 hour day (Now w/ midterm!). And tonight is shaping into a very long night. Pediatrics is hard. It's a whole new barrel of monkeys and that = lots of reading, and an instructor who is double-dipping us on the lectures (we get a handful in person and, additionally, online lectures that go on and on and on). And the instructor is often wrong (eg. "Hotdogs should be served to infants in cylinders." Which is *more* wrong: hot dogs served to infants? Or hot dogs served in the ultimate choking hazard form?) and she's often mean (she lectured us for 15 minutes on the first day about how our papers are always late: um, we haven't turned in any papers) and she's almost always confused (see other examples).

Wheeeeeeeeeee!

3 comments:

Kitt said...

Ouch! Good luck on your test!

(Off to Google puffed pancakes. Never heard of 'em.)

Anonymous said...

Yeah...baking projects tend not to soothe you, yet you keep embarking upon them. Why? Why? Why? WHY?

Molly said...

I don't want to be soothed. I want to bake tasty stuff.