My Baby's Sick and my Baking Failure!

Since Valentine's Day fell on a Sunday, Ben and I agreed to celebrate on Monday.  Our Sundays are jammed full with church and ministries, and we were too tired to exchange cards and enjoy a pleasant meal together.  Today I had grand aspirations of a big baking day and a fancy homemade dinner, a gleaming home and a fresh, beaming housewife to greet her sweetheart.  HA! 

I'm stealing just a fragment of time to share my chaotic day with you.  I know we all have these, so I'm trying to see the humor in this moment.

Grace has been struggling with a cough for a couple of days now, but this morning she woke up with a full blown cold.  She's not eating well, her nose is dripping like a faucet, and she is coughing a very loud, productive cough.  She is very clingy and whiny, and I can't say that I blame her.  Her nose is dripping all over the place, and it seems like I couldn't get to the Kleenex box fast enough.  So I came up with a novel solution:

Kleenex stuffed in the hood of her sweater!  She has no clue it's there, and I always have a Kleenex handy! 

I had a solid three hours while she was napping to get some chores done, so I tackled the laundry and the baking chores.  I'm drying the last load of laundry now, but the baking.... is another story.

I used the last of the muffins for Ben's lunch, so I was due for another monster batch.  I thought I'd be creative and try double chocolate muffins.  Long story short...it's a case of improvising gone very wrong.

I got the recipe from allrecipes.com.  I tried to make them oatmeal double chocolate muffins.  And, of course, I doubled the recipe.  They came out burnt, flat, falling apart, and awful-tasting.  I wasted a bunch of flour, oatmeal, sugar, and the worst... CHOCOLATE CHIPS and DUTCH BAKING CHOCOLATE.

At this point, I'm starting to feel like Grace's potato head creation today.