Hey, Y'all! Breakfast Is On the Floor!

I want a Mother's Day do-over.

It started off great. There wasn't a cloud in the morning sky as I put my family's favorite breakfast casserole in the oven. Jason brewed a pot of my favorite coffee, and gave me his gift, which is exactly what I wanted: a navy squall jacket with the Northwestern crab boat logo on it in honor of my favorite vessel on my favorite Discovery Channel show, The Deadliest Catch. All was right with the world.

And then I made the biggest cooking error I've ever made: I tried to lift the 13 x 9 Pyrex casserole pan filled with sausage, cheese, eggs, and Crescent Roll dough (settle down; we don't eat this every day) out of the oven with just one hand.

You know where this is going, right? After about two seconds, I did, too, but was just as powerless as you are to stop it.

Because I am a moron and didn't have a mitt on my other hand, I couldn't just reach out and steady it. When the whole pan started to tip, and my wrist could no longer hold its weight, I just had to watch it all happen and get my bare feet out of the way.

The whole concoction, which with baking time had occupied a full hour of my morning, went Splat! on the floor. And the inside of the oven door.

But I gotta give props to the geniuses who developed Pyrex, because even though one side of the dish pounded my tile floor, it didn't break. So, there's that.

The casserole, alas, could not be saved. I had done a bang-up job greasing the pan, so it all slid right out onto the very unsanitary place where my feet spend most of their time.

That didn't stop Jason from considering it.

"Hey, remember that episode of Friends where they fight over the cheesecake and it ends up getting dropped on the floor in the hallway and they just go get forks and eat the top part? We could do that..."

Um, no.

So after me cleaning eggs and gooey cheese off of my oven door and the floor, Ainsley had Pop Tarts. Jason sipped coffee. I just swallowed anger and self-loathing, which are as bitter and unsatisfying as you might expect.

Later I tried to salvage the day by taking Ainsley to a Mommy-and-Me lunch at Chipotle. As we were standing in line, Ainsley tugged on my hand.

"I'm tired," she said.

There's a certain look my kid gets when she's sick. One eyelid droops and all color drains from her face. She gets a hang-dog posture that says, I give. You win, virus. Ainsley won't ever complain about a sore throat or a stomach ache, because she thinks to do so means a strep test. And if there is anything in this world that will get my kid to fight and scream like she's in mortal peril, it's the sight of a long cotton swab in the hands of a pediatric nurse.

She had this look, and she had a hot forehead. A nice Mother's Day meal was just not in our cards. Which ended up being just as well around 8pm, when Ainsley started perking up just as I had to run to the bathroom to be sick.

I've been saying I need a do-over.

Except for this:

At the peak of me realizing I had picked up some kind of bug, and feeling really sorry for myself, all three of us curled up in the living room in front of The Amazing Race season finale. Ainsley was cuddly and sweet as she watched her favorite (and only, thank goodness) reality show with us. I looked at my little family, who despite being a tad under the weather, is happy, healthy, and whole.

At that moment, I told myself to shut the heck up about a ruined breakfast, a fevered lunch, and a mild invasion of harmless viruses. So I didn't get a nice Mother's Day breakfast, so Ainsley had a fever, so my stomach felt the way it usually only does after a turn on the Tilt-a-Whirl. It was still an awesome Mother's Day, because my little brood got to spend it together. I ended the day counting my blessings instead of having another serving of self-pity.

And really, there's not much that an evening spent watching worthy reality-show contestants racing to win a million dollars won't fix.

Happy belated Mother's Day to all of you moms who read the blog. I would say I hope yours was better than mine, but mine turned out okay in the end, spilt milk (and eggs) and all.