How the Pasta Burnt

It wasn't really the best of culinary moments anyway. 

We had enough pasta for two and a Jar of sauce.  This was the meal for the parents, being too nutritionally void to offer children.

There was no great plan beyond cooking the pasta and stirring in the sauce. That was all.  But. It was an overreach on my part. A & E were happily eating couscous (yes these really are the initials of my children, and now, relating the burnt pasta incident, seems appropriate).  Couscous is so easy.  I needed easy. To make up for easy there were roasted vegetables (possibly even four of the five a day) to be picked out daintily by A and spat out by E. For protein: smoked sausage.  It doesn't need cooking - great stuff. Not great nutritionally maybe but it ticked a box.  So I was happy with that. I was unconcerned that a shower of couscous was landing on the highchair tabled and floor and would later be sticking to bare feet or socks. Children were eating no one was whining, no one was trying to fly from the high chair. There was some singing, some silliness and happy faces.  And then I thought. I could put the pasta on.

Pasta in saucepan. Switch on gas hob. walk back to table with children. Briefly it must have occured to me to put water in the pan.  I found the kettle had been on when I started to smell the acrid scent of the meal I should not have attempted. 

The saucepan was two weeks old.

It survived.

Previously in the same week E discovered Tantrums.  Daily tantrums now with added language - to every single thing I said the response crying, resistence, and don't want to. Tantrums for every single school run. Morning. Evening. Tantrums for being asked to hold hands next to a road. Tantrums for going to his friends house. Tantrums for not going to his friends house. Tantrums for leaving. Tantrums for being hungry. Tantrums for being offered the wrong food.  Tantrums to the point that I cannot remember which way is up.

I called the Children's Centre and booked myself onto a parenting course.  I'll let you know whether pasta gets more edible.