Good Housekeeping

The Black Widow. The Torch. Mistress of Death. These are all names I have come to be known by during my quest toward ultimate domesticity over the last five years.

There are some motherly/wifely duties I have mastered -- keeping a fairly clean and organized house, groceries, picking up dry cleaning (oooh. Good one. I ROCK at that), laundry, making sure the children live through the day...But, there are some chores that day after day, week after week, year after year, continue to elude my housewifely prowess. In fact, not only do they continue to somehow escape my radar, but I manage to do them over and over again, really, really badly.

First on the list is toast. I cannot seem to get toast right on the first go-around no matter how determined I am at the onset. It always takes me two times to get it right. This used to perplex and irritate my husband to no end. He would say, "Rosana. Seriously. What is up with you and toast? What is going on?" as if Toast and I had this long, tortured past that always ended in an ugly confrontation with me throwing Toast head-first into the toaster oven, turning the oven on, and then tossing my head back and cackling with evil glee as it turned a charred, black mess.

The toast incidents continue to this day and my husband has taken to keeping his disappointment to himself, simply shaking his head each time I dispose of the morning hockey puck.

More worrisome than the toast is how these massacres seem to be going beyond slices of bread. Last night for instance, I baked two trays of french fries for an impromptu dinner with the in-laws. The timer was set and there was NO chance these puppies were not going to make it into a pool of ketchup. The timer beeps, I turn it off, but do I remove the fries? No. I say to myself, "I'll take them out in a sec once I finish blah, blah, blah."

Some time later, right before we sit down to our turkey burgers, I yell out in horror, "THE FRIES!" The in-laws have no idea what the hysteria is about until I open the oven.



As I sheepishly sit down to a dinner with burgers, no fries, my 4-year-old daughter decides to go ahead and address the issue head-on as only a preschooler can.

"Mommy kills fries...and plants."