But the one thing that the kids really enjoy is snow cones. We don't have an industrial sized ice shaver, but we do have a little Cuisinart hand blender. I'll take a handful of ice cubes, toss them into the blender with some fruit juice and real fruit, and blend it until it turns into a nice, slushy treat.
I crush up the ice cubes before I toss them into the blender with a mallet, but there was a day when I couldn't find the mallet. So I looked through our drawer and found a potato masher. It was made of metal, so it was sturdy enough. I covered the ice cubes with a towel, and began cracking the ice. As I continuously looked under the towel to check the status of the cubes, I noticed they were not cracking much at all. Why, you may ask? Because I broke the potato masher!
Well, I didn't totally break the masher, but I rendered it un-potato mashable. The metal masher bent under the pressure of the ice cubes. I tried to figure out my next move, but the kids were getting impatient.
"Why you stop?" asked Andrew.
"Oh. Well. I broke the masher," I answered.
"You broke it?" exclaimed Emma. "How you broke it?"
"The ice cubes were too hard to mash with the masher," I explained.
I saw where this was going: the kids were soon going to obsess over how I broke the potato masher. So I decided to quickly make this a non-issue.
"Don't worry about the masher. It's okay. Don't tell Mommy! The important thing is that we have to make your yummy snow cones!" I beamed with cynical joy. The kids cheered.
I thought this whole snow cone/potato masher episode was behind me, until I returned from work the next day. As I entered from the back door, Lisa caught me by surprise.
"Do you have something to tell me?" she asked.
I knew this was a set-up. What could it be? Did she find out I broke her glasses? Did she find my stash of Kathy Bates pornography? I didn't know what to say, so I said my good old stand-by answer, "Duh. I dunno."
With that, Lisa pulled out the unmashable masher! How did she find out about the masher? I hid it in the one place where she would never find it -- the cookbook shelf.
She began to explain to me that while she was preparing dinner for the kids, Emma kept on telling her, "Daddy broke that. Daddy broke that." She didn't know what Emma was talking about until Emma specifically pointed out the broken masher on the shelf.
"Daddy broke that," said Emma. "He was trying to break ice, but it didn't work. He broke it. Daddy say not to tell you he broke it. But he broke it."
Lisa and I had a good laugh over Emma being a tattletale. But deep inside, I panicked as I had to figure out a way to prevent Emma from telling Lisa why Kathy Bates dropped in for a surprise visit yesterday afternoon.
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