dinnertime chaos

If you can imagine, the dinnertime preparation hour in our home can be a bit of a crazy time.  Olivia is clingy because she's still waking up from her nap, Amelia is grumpy because she's hungry and her snack from 30 minutes ago has worn off already, Meredith and Claire are thinking that RIGHT NOW is a great time to bake some cookies, Aunt Jill is on the phone because she's on her way home from work, and Josh is calling to let me know that he had to stop on the way home to pick up a few things for the new roof that is being put on the house this weekend.  

Okay, okay, this isn't EVERY day...just today.  

While all this is happening, this little pumpkin...

(she's not as innocent as she looks)...decides that she is going to get into my spice bin, which was sitting on the counter.  I didn't notice, and apparently no one else did either.  

In a short minute, there was ground cumin all.over.the.bar.area.  Yikes.  

Meanwhile, this one... 

...was trying to make peanut butter cookies for the guys who would be working on our roof.  As sweet as that was, a certain adult who was in the middle of cooking dinner and cleaning up ground cumin needed to assist her, and let's just say it wasn't good timing.  

The adult told the child to immediately stop making cookies.  That event would have to wait for a later hour when the adult wasn't losing her patience.  

While I was cleaning up the cumin, the toasted pecans turned into burnt pecans.  Lovely.

Finally, I found two minutes (while the broccoli was steaming) to have a discussion with Olivia about getting into my spices.  When I picked her up, I realized that she had poop leaking out of her diaper. 

Enough already!!

We made it through dinner with only one small milk spill.

Shortly after dinner, obviously not learning anything from the pre-dinner fiasco, a certain 5 year old...

(who is absolutely as ornery as she looks) ...was playing with our homemade batch of firecracker rub.

I could give you two guesses as to what happened next, but really, you'll only need one.  

Currently, our trash contains about one full cup of spice and has quite an interesting aroma...spicy.  

I always knew we needed to keep weapons, medications, scissors, glue, and the like under lock and key.  I think I'm going to add spices to that list as well.