We parents are always in need of Patience Therapy. Let’s face it, by about Thursday or so, our nerves are frazzled, ideas exhausted, and often our houses a mess. So what better time to drop on by to Having Patience to share and enjoy a few funny stories about our lives? This is my first adventure into hosting a carnival of sorts, so I’m sure in the coming weeks it will evolve - feel free to provide your input and ideas.

Since I’m so excited to kick this off and I already published this post once, I’m gonna go ahead and kick off the carnival today. I’m keeping my fingers crossed to hear from some of you. From now on, each and every Monday I’ll post the idea for the week, and Thursday morning around 8 Eastern Time, I’ll put up the carnival for you to share all your great stories. I’m really looking forward to hearing from all of you! As with most carnivals, if you could please link back to my site in your post, then come on over and give us your post’s unique link (not your general blog), we’ll be all set. You know, the usual rules. Maybe next week I’ll have a fancy schmancy button for you! (Hint Hint lovely husband o’ mine!)

For today, I’ve been inspired by all the recent articles and blogs relating to cooking: perhaps because of the season, and maybe just in preparation for the giddiness that comes with the weekend (read: possibility of a break in the near future?), I was struck with an epiphany. I think it would be fun to share some of our most hilarious moments in the kitchen. Admit it, we all have those dirty little secrets from back in the day before we knew what we were doing (whether that was years ago, yesterday, or we still haven’t a clue..). So I want to hear all about yours! I’ll even share one or two of mine (I have oh. so. many.)

Here’s my first contribution:

Way back in the early days of my baking, I really wanted to make my mother’s shortbread - buttery goodness I can’t live without. Truly it’s a simple recipe - sugar, butter, flour and I thought naively that there was no possibility of anything going wrong. I carefully measured everything, kneaded the dough and cut out the cookies. Now before my son, I had very little patience for this kind of thing and all this work took a lot longer than I thought it was going to. Though I do like cookie dough and contemplated just eating the dough, really shortbread needs to be baked. And since on that particular day I wanted instant gratification - the 12 minutes they took to bake was far too long - I decided in infinite wisdom typical of those in their late teens/early twenties to microwave bake them! Now the voice of my wiser self says “Umm, what did you just say?” , but at the time this was a grand idea. Into the microwave I put my dinner plate of cookies (not a metal plate, I did have some sense). I don’t remember how long I put them on for, but I can say I didn’t watch while this was going on. The first thing I noticed was the smoke. I don’t know that I saw flame, but when I took out the cookies, they were black - I didn’t know a microwave could do that!