I don’t know why I ever thought my kids would never, ever spill when they were outside of our house.
It seems to be one of the things they really excel at.
They practice spilling at home for hours, sometimes days on end despite my incessant, “Can we just get through ONE meal, maybe just appetizers without someone spilling something?!”
They laugh and spill all around me when I make such unthinkable requests so why did I think they could flip a switch and not spill?
We’ve had some famous spills over the years.
The one that is probably still ranked as having the longest life-span for both permanence of the spill but also the retelling of the story, was when my husband, Greg, joked about what might happen if a soupy, sauced-up meatball rolled off of his plate onto my brother and sister-in-law’s immaculate, white carpet and sure enough, it did.
But the meatball didn’t just roll off the plate and onto the white carpet, (and no, it wasn’t right after somebody sneezed and it didn’t roll onto the floor, out the door and grow into a tree), but it did hit the top of the white stairs, roll the full eight, white, rises followed by eight more, agonizing runs, down to a main living area and then clear across the room, leaving a red Diana sauce train that could wrap three times around the earth.
On the weekend, while visiting at a friend’s house, our eight year old came into their living room, told a couple of jokes, snuck a piece of cheese from the adult appetizer platter, (the kids had obviously finished their foie gras and toast points) elbowed a bottle of red wine landing it on the carpet pouring everywhere, skipped out of the room like nothing happened and everyone just stopped and stared.
Two things saved the day.
1. The greatest hosts to ever walk the face of the earth had the best trick ever to make their guests feel like not only were they not upset that in just five minutes we managed to lower the resale value of their home by thousands of dollars, they pretended they wanted it to happen.
They immediately pulled out some hardwood samples from somewhere, a hidden latch under the floor, from inside the Grandfather clock (the way Webster used to hide things or himself) and said, “We were just about to redo this floor. This will just speed up the project.”
2. Someone said, “If you ever doubted whose daughter Ellie was, this is proof she’s yours Liz.”
I had forgotten how many times I had spilled or broken things over the years. Maybe they come by it honestly.
The Rorschach pattern on the floor confirmed what we were all thinking. It looked exactly like a runaway meatball.
