Three Cups

One morning my mom wasn't up yet, and my little brother decided to make some waffles for breakfast as a surprise. As some of you have most likely experienced, when little kids decide to make breakfast, almost always something happens.

When I came out of bed, he had already finished the waffle batter and had put plastic wrap over the bowl. I told him he should wait to cook them till mom got out of bed, but that it was a good idea. I went into the living room to read, and mom got out of bed about 15 minutes later. I was still reading when Aidan showed her the waffles. I heard her say, "Oh Aidan! How sweet of you. I'm so glad I don't have to worry about breakfast. Did you make sure you got all the ingredients?"

Aidan and mom went over the recipe to make sure he had put everything in and the right amount. Then, I heard my mom exclaim, "Good heavens! Three cups?!"

I went in to see why my mom had gotten so surprised. When I asked her what had happened she said, "You know how when I write out recipes on sticky notes, they're rather sloppy and hastily written?" I groggily nodded yes (I was still tired). "Well," my mom continued, " I wrote out the recipe, but I didn't have enough room to write out the whole recipe. I usually put in 1/4 of a cup of sugar, but since I didn't have room to write that out, I put a semicolon next to the three cups of flour and wrote sugar. Since Aidan didn't know that, he put three cups of sugar in the waffles!"

Mom looked at Aidan and said, "Did we even have three cups of sugar?"

"Not anymore!" he giggled.

So that morning we had waffles with three cups of sugar, and they were so sweet we didn't even need syrup.

The moral of the story is, if your mother writes her recipes on sticky notes that are sloppy and hastily written with semicolons, you should probably make sure she doesn't mean three cups of sugar.