I am perpetually seeking to give my kids authentic experiences.  The Real Deal, let’s-make-this-from-scratch, “home-made is heart-made.” The results are often disappointingly lackluster, because, frankly, I am not a professional, and neither are they.  I am, weirdy, often surprised, even shocked, at the cringe-worthy results.   Perhaps I get cocky, and forget I went to school for vet med, not culinary or baking arts and I am so far away from Martha Stewart, we are tiny specks waving to each other across the Universe of Craftiness.  My activity mom life is a series of events that could be the complete series of the show Nailed It, a virtual how-not-to do (fill in blank with everything/anything).  When thinking of this, I immediately fondly recall making chocolate ice cream bowls by coating halves of balloons in melted chocolate and freezing them.  Pop those balloons and voila!–a beautiful delicious edible bowl!  Only, our bowls look like a misshapen kid’s holey shoe after walking through dog shit.

“Mommy why does my bowl not look like the picture?”

“Sawyer, just eat the bowl.  See? How amazing, a bowl you can eat!!! And wasn’t it fun to pop the balloon?  IT WAS FUN, WASN’T IT.”

Laughing at their mom’s ineptitude

The other issue is something people are often too ashamed to bring up:  DIY, while being so great and making us theoretically feel so accomplished, is usually really goddamn expensive.  Once you figure in the cost of buying multiple components to create something on your own, the time you take to make it (and in my case, make it multiple times over and over because I keep screwing it up), it really would have been easier and much cheaper to buy whatever thing pre-made.  Plus, you wouldn’t have to explain to others what that thing was supposed to be.

This is bringing me to one of my more stellar f-ups in these types of hopeful endeavors.  Not that any of my kids asked for this, but I thought it would be so cool to make our own cannolis.  I am not even 100% sure any of them knew what cannolis even were.  But they are generally up for whatever when it comes to messing up the kitchen and anything that sounds remotely dessert-like, so they seemed excited.  First I went on some kind of wild goose-chase looking for a cannoli form.  This is a metal hollow rod that you use to wrap the dough around and then lower it all into a deep fat fryer.  I looked in all the kitchen-type stores but no one seemed to have them.  Even at Williams-Sonoma, which has items such as a gold-plated spoon with which to rest a smaller gold-plated spoon inside it.  I can’t even recall where I eventually found one of these rods, but I’m pretty sure I had to sell one of my organs on the black market to procure it.  What I am 100% sure of is that I spent way more time and gasoline on trying to get this goddamn rod than I would ever even admit to.

Finally finding the rod, I was so self-satisfied, that I almost stopped there.  But I showed one of the girls the rod and she wasn’t too impressed, so I sighed and realized we would have to go through with the whole thing.  I had found a recipe for one that had a cookies n cream filling–what kid doesn’t swoon for cookies n cream?? Making the filling wasn’t too bad, I think that part was relatively idiot-proof.  However, emboldened by this positive progress, I think I started to get a big head.  We made a big-ass mess of the kitchen making the cannoli dough, think puffs and piles of flour everywhere, making it look like Al Pacino’s desk in Scarface.  At one point I looked over and Sloane was holding up her cat, Hippie, and making her help knead the dough.  Let’s just keep that between us, ok babes?

Hippie helps, (most likely after using the litter box)

I have no deep fat fryer, so here’s what I did: I filled a pot with oil because that’s what the internet told me to do and the internet never leads you astray, except when it tells my clients to treat their dog’s ulcerative malignant mast cell tumor with  CBD oil and mistletoe.  I wrapped the dough around the cannoli form and lowered it into the boiling cauldron.  This is really not so bad, I thought, who needs a deep fat fryer anyway? It’s just like the days in the Old Country.  I felt like I was channeling a wise Italian nonna who also happens to sexily resemble Sophia Lauren.  As I smoothed my hands on my apron sensibly and capably the way I would imagine Nonna Sophia would do, I realized I was burning the first cannoli, which had quickly turned from a beautiful chestnut brown to a charred black.  In hastily removing it, the pot moved and some oil sloshed over the side onto the gas burners, sending a shot of fire into the air and alighting a roll of paper towels that I had flippantly left right next to the stovetop.  At this point the girls had already wandered out of the kitchen to find something else to entice their attentions (“Mom’s got this”), so alone and panicked I tried to douse it all with a kitchen towel which unfortunately was wet from Sloane’s half-assed attempt at cleaning up the flour mess.  Remember the old saying about oil and water not mixing? As it turns out, this is not just a saying.  I was back in undergrad chem lab and this time I was about to fail the class.  A giant mushroom of flames shot up to the ceiling and I dove away in slo mo like a clumsy version of 007.

Fortunately I happened to land in a dog bed that one of the kids had pulled into the kitchen and left there in what I guess was their contribution to redecorating the house.  I screamed for the kids to get out of the house and was about to dial 911, when I  spotted some dry towels and smothered the flames out.  Who needs the fire department? I thought breathlessly, feeling a sense of DIY accomplishment in putting out my own explosion.  Surveying the damage, I noticed the wood counter top, cabinets above and below and the ceiling, spreading all the way across the kitchen, were covered in ribbons of thick soot.  The formerly white cabinets themselves also had ugly bubbling from the heat, like they had some weird disease.  The disease of stupidity, I thought.

I spy an innocent pot and bottle of oil

“There was a little accident,” I explained to Sean later on the phone.  My voice tried to be light and airy, as though the accident might have been that I spilled a drop of tea on the counter.  Sean knows my ways of dumbassery, and was unfooled by my attempts at a downplay.  There was a silence that followed, which forced me to fill it with a quick recounting of the fire, which at my recollection had been wholly unavoidable and not related in any way to anything I had mistakenly done.  Once home, he surveyed the damage and shook his head sadly, the way you do when you realize not only is there no hope for the person who has created said damage, but that you have combined your life with this person and you are instantaneously also sad for yourself.  “You know, you just bought this house 2 months ago” was his comforting thought.

We allowed the kitchen to remain this way for the last 2 years.  Yes, you read that correctly.  My excuse is we had a baby in the meantime, but even that is beyond weak I realize.  I initially tried to scrub away the soot but that soot is a stubborn little bugger, and I got tired trying after about 5 minutes.  When friends came over, we would dim the lights to make it less noticeable.  One person actually commented on the “cool faux finish on the ceiling.”  “Yes, yes,” we said, “so cool isn’t it?”  At one point I wrote in the ceiling soot “Sean, clean me” as a cute way to send the message.  This was, as you can imagine, received with unenthusiastic quiet rage.  I would occasionally work on sections of the wall and ceiling to remove what soot I could, a totally thankless job with no real appreciable progress. At some point I painted most of the wall so it could have the appearance of a work in progress, which is always easier to explain away to people.  “It’s one of our many projects! Ya know, DIY, Pinterest, Industrial Chic, insert any other pretentious buzz phrase! Old houses, whadayagonnado? You never stop working on them, am I right? AM I RIGHT???”

check out the beautiful faux finish on the ceiling: it was done using a new colour called Soot Regrets

However, one glorious day, I came home on a Saturday from work to find the cabinet door removed, the glass removed and a thorough sanding and painting of the cabinets in progress.  Over the course of 2 days and 2 cans of paint and lots of Sean Labor, it looked much more like the cute little galley kitchen it was supposed to be.  I had wanted a soothing blue ceiling and Sean went right out and picked out the perfect colour, confirming that procreating with him had been a sound decision.  We still have plans to replace the counter tops to be all wood, to replace the bottom cabinets which have most definitely seen better days and years, and to replace the  vinyl faux wood flooring (four words that should never be strung together) with a diagonal white and black tile.  But any traces of my cannoli folly are gone, only known to a select few, the secret of which will remain locked under the repainted walls and ceilings (thank god walls can’t actually talk).  For Christmas that year, Sean’s dad bought me pre-made cannoli shells, a funny and sweet gesture.  However, I was never able to bring myself to use them, as my stubbornness prevented this admission of defeat.  Somewhere in my head, the dumbass part no doubt, I envision one day procuring a deep fat fryer and a retelling of the homemade cannoli tale with a happy, nonexplosive ending this time around.  In the meantime, I at least can look at this for what it truly is: a DIY gone terribly wrong turned into a DIY gone terribly right.