Flour child

I knew when I heard the way my wife called his name – “PARKER WHITFIELD!!!!” – that we were at a crossroads.
And down one of those roads was a bad day – the potential start of one of those avalanche days of bad things, piling up and on, with stubbed toes and being cut off in traffic and losing your keys and all the other things that seem to follow when your day starts like that.
Fortunately, we did not go down that road. Instead, I looked at my wife. She looked at me. “He’s covered in flour,” I said. “And so is the kitchen.”
At that point, we headed down the better road, the one that didn’t end in a tequila bender in Mexico.
You see, my wife was making cookies and decided to have Parker help. There were three big flaws in her plan:
1. She was making cookies at eight in the morning. No one is ready to make cookies at 8 a.m. except professional bakers. All of us other non-baker humans should not even try baking cookies until well after a pot or seven of coffee. It’s just not wise.
2. She enlisted the help of a 4-year-old. She would have been better served to enlist the support of a seizuring macaw.
3. She lost the “Who Can Pretend to Be Asleep the Longest?” game, and therefore did have me to run interference for her. See, the kids are now old enough that they can somewhat fend for themselves in the morning, so we don’t have to spring out of bed the minute they are up. It’s nice to know you can lie in bed and know that, in the other room, your children are quietly painting each other and pulling all the stuffing out of a couch cushion. So my wife and I play this exciting game. First one to admit to being up loses. Winner gets to sleep in. My wife is normally very good at this game. She claims to be good because she is actually sleeping. I find that hard to believe.
So where was I? Right, Parker helping with cookies. So my wife had all of the ingredients out on the counter, and Parker was handing her things as she needed them. Apparently, he decided she needed the flour, and he went for the big plastic canister that holds roughly 65,000 cups of flour. I have no idea why we have that much flour. Apparently we are expecting the entire state of Kentucky to come over for made-from-scratch biscuits or something.
But anyway, Parker’s attempt, well, failed, and he ended up dumping the canister on his head, covering him in white powder, sending flour to all corners of the kitchen, and creating a nice little mushroom cloud of flour dust that I hope will settle in the next few weeks.
By the time I got to the kitchen (the “WHITFIELD” echo was just starting to fade), Parker was really not sure what to think. I am fairly certain that one thing that was prominent in his mind was, “This was probably not the wisest course of action.”
He looked at me and then his mother. And when he saw that we were, well, on the floor laughing, he too felt a little more at ease, although he was somewhat tempered in his celebration, as every time he would move a big puff of flour would cloud up in his face, so he would start spitting and sneezing and coughing.
Eventually, I got most of the flour off his body, mainly by taking off his pajamas, so he looked like a little naked kabuki actor halfway through makeup. Truth be told, I do not recall how I got the rest of the flour got off of his head. It probably involved the dog.
But the important point was that my wife and I could have let this be a very bad start to the day. And to both of our credit, we didn’t. We laughed at the funny things in life, and reserved the serious, stern side for important infractions, such as standing in front of the TV during a football game or eating the last peanut butter bar, which Daddy SPECIFICALLY got for his lunch and hid them on the top shelf INSIDE the crock pot, under a dish towel for the exact purpose of hiding them so that he could have them for himself. You know, meaningful stuff.
It’s not to say that we, like everyone on the planet, don’t sometimes have the wrong reaction now and again. But it’s good to have a successful flour-dumped-on-your-kid’s-head dry run to remind you to keep things in perspective. More often than not, it’s just not that big of a deal. That said, I sure hope Kentucky doesn’t show up.