Can it rain any harder?!?

I sat yesterday watching it rain.  I love a good downpour as much as the next person but this was CRAZY!  We had a small pond in our driveway from the sewer grate plugging up with leaves.  The kids wouldn't take their quiet time because there was one clap of thunder and they were freaked out for the rest of the afternoon (maybe it was just a ploy).  I had promised pumpkin pie for a family get together that evening and I had 2 great pumpkins on my front porch just waiting to be broken into and cooked.  So, despite the rain, we took to the front porch where we mutilated two huge pumpkins.  After the mutilation we had to squeeze them into the oven for cooking.  My oven wasn't big enough so in the middle of what seemed like a torrential downpour I raced over to a neighbors house and asked if he would kindly let me use his oven.

While the pumpkins baked the kids and I had a lot of fun examining the different types of seeds.  We compared seeds from a candy pumpkin, cinderella pumpkin, cheese wheel pumpkin and a jack o' lantern pumpkin.  The kids were very excited about this and my son actually wanted to make a chart so we could check off which pumpkins had specific features.  We managed to label sandwich bags and, after they dried, we put the seeds in their own bags in hopes that we will be able to find the bags in the spring to plant a few pumpkin seeds.  This prospect is very exciting to the kids as we had grown sunflowers this summer and those were a huge hit.

Once the pumpkin was done I was surprised.  I thought for sure I would have all sorts of help in the kitchen but the kids did not want to touch the pumpkin.  They were really grossed out by it so I ended up doing all of the work by myself.  I started out on this endeavor thinking I had a great project to last all day and I ended up spraying pumpkin chunks all over my kitchen while my kids destroyed the rest of the house.  Boy did that ever backfire!

I remember one time on another stormy day when I went shopping at IKEA with all three kids.  I pulled into the parking lot and it was raining so hard I was going to turn around and all of a sudden it stopped.  Then a parking spot opened up right in front and I thought this was a sign from God that I was supposed to go into IKEA that day.  The shopping trip was quick but then I had to wait 20 minutes in line with a brand new and very hungry baby, an impatient two year old and a four year old who climbed better than most monkeys.  The clerk had the audacity to ask if they could switch cashiers right before me.  I actually told her no.

Have you ever had any ideas backfire?  There have been too many "Katie"-did moments in my history where they have seemed like great ideas but never panned out.  Share some of your great moments where you thought you were going to earn your Super-Mom award but instead it went down in infamy as dinner-time comedy.
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