spaghetti, spaghetti

Today seriously reminds me of a poem I use every year in my classroom.  The poem is called "Spaghetti, Spaghetti" written by the famous Mr. Shel Silverstein.  But today this poem has come back to haunt me, mock me, and ruin my carpet.  The beginning of the poem goes like this:

"Spaghetti, spaghetti all over the place,

Up to my elbows, up to my face!

Over the carpet,  and under the chairs

Into the hammock

And wound round the stairs..."

I fixed spaghetti for lunch today after church.  It is no one's favorite, but its cheap, and the quickest meal I can make and get on with my regularly scheduled, highly anticipated Sunday afternoon nap. Its ready and everyone starts to come and make their plate.  Elisabeth is crawling around as usual just looking to see who she can trip.  Sarah makes her plate.  She starts walking into the dining room and does a silly little dance for Elisabeth and I watch in slow motion her big pile of spaghetti slide off her plate and onto the carpet.  Elisabeth thinks she just hit a gold mine and crawls fast to get her hands into that big mess - I grab E and put her in the living room while Sarah gets the "Resolve" carpet cleaner and starts working away like Cinderella on the bright tomato red spot on the carpet. Not even two minutes later Jacob comes walking through the living room with his plate of spaghetti and this time I am watching in slow motion horror as HIS pile of spaghetti drops in a big blob on the carpet.  At this point there is no where to put Elisabeth to keep her from getting into someone's pile of spaghetti ON THE FLOOR!!! Kids are laughing, I am FUMING, Jonathan reminded me of when I dumped my taco salad last week on the floor, I tell him to quit being a smart aleck - and gosh, we hadn't even been out of church an hour.  Isn't that how it goes?  ( Didn't I mention a few posts ago that we just had the carpets in the entire house professionally steamed cleaned last month? ) The kids did their best to clean it up - as clean as getting red sauce out of really old carpet goes...

My kid's new best friend

So I'll have a new story to tell when I teach the spaghetti poem to a new crop of second graders.  (There is alot more to the poem, its really cute if you are a teacher and want to look it up.)  Several years ago I tried to do a craft project with my 1st graders off this poem.   The project was an EPIC FAIL - for many reasons.  I come up with alot of crazy ideas in the middle of when I'm teaching to drive home a point.  Some of them work and make me feel like teacher of the year, but alot of them don't and thats when I start praying that the principal doesn't walk through until we can get our mess cleaned up. This one was the latter of the two.  We are learning this poem, I have been teaching them "Visualizing."  I decided to let them create an illustration to this poem using cooked spaghetti noodles.  Everyone gets a pile of spaghetti, we dip all the noodles in glue, then put it on a big piece of construction paper - draw some characters - and Presto! I thought this would be a really awesomely cool display for the hall.  Let me just tell all you teachers out there that glue dipped spaghetti shrinks and takes the construction paper with it - so you end up with a crinkled, shriveled ball of dried glue/construction paper mess, that you can't even put in a folder let alone hang on the wall.  I was too embarrassed to even send it home.  I'm sure they could say, "Look what our teacher had us waste 3 hours on but we sure had alot of fun!!" 

I know that soon today's spaghetti story will give us all a laugh.  Actually, it gave the kids a laugh 2 seconds after it happened, and I'm starting to smile about it.  The faint stain is still in the carpet in the dining room and in the living room.  My house sports that "lived in" look quite well.  And I guess I wouldn't have it any other way.