Uses for Rice

There are many uses for rice:

To Eat (obviously)

Throwing at weddings (although most people have switched to bird seed)

Japanese Field Art

To make Starch

For festivals

Or, in Sarah's case:

Home Decor

Yes, today I discovered Sarah had decorated Rice throughout our ENTIRE basement. It was everywhere. How it happened, I'll explain. I had a large bag of rice from Costco, I opened it up I divided it up into several gallon-sized ziploc baggies, then I placed it on my food storage shelves. Well, my mistake was to leave them on a low shelf in the basement. *sigh* Yup, easy to open bags + within reach = Rice Decor.

I was letting Sarah play downstairs while I did some housework and she decided that a fun game to play would be to throw rice and the kitty and watch her try and catch it. Thus the Rice decor came into place. I should have taken a picture, but I was a little upset, and put Sarah in her room to, uh, keep her alive. Okay I was fuming, so to save Sarah from harsh words and to prevent me from feeling guilty for saying them, I put her in her room, is that wrong? I don't know, it was the best decision in the heat of the moment, and boy was there heat.

Well after it was all cleaned (and I was cooled off), I went upstairs and Sarah and I had a nice long talk filled with apologizes and hugs. We went and had some lunch and afterwards Sarah and I went downstairs to switch the laundry. Sarah was looking around and saying,

"Hmmm, where is it?"

I realized she was referring to the rice so I told her (with a humph in my tone),

"The rice is all gone Sarah, mommy had to clean it all up."

Then Sarah turned to me and with a bubbly expression on her face replied,

"Great job, Mon-ney!"

And that right there made it all better. Maybe next time I will let Sarah assist me in that "great job." It was so ironic, I was upstairs cleaning and Sarah was downstairs messing. HA!

The good things about this experience:

I was able to vacuum the entire basement (so it is more clean, yay)

I learned the best way to vacuum up spilled rice

(you have to use your hose attachment and make long lines away from you, if you go side to side it shoots all over the place)

Sarah and I got to talk about feelings

A little bit of excercise

I finally get to make a cute rice hot pack (can't let all that rice go to waste!)

The bad things about this experience:

I am going to be finding random grains of rice for months!