"Tragedy" Starts with Tea

This may be my last post; I expect Child Protective Services to be arriving momentarily in their large black helicopters. But it was all an accident, I swear.

It started out as a standard Daddy's-home-and-making-tea kind of morning. L got up and demanded her usual portion. It was a fresh brewed pot and I filled her little sippy-cup about 3/4 full. We were just about out of milk, so she got a dab rather than the usual 50% mix. I added the sugar and went to cap the cup. I couldn't find the little flow restrictor stopper that fits in, so I went without, thinking L is a mature young lady who can handle her drinking. Wish that were the case with Daddy.

As I bring her cup over to her at the table I launch into a paternalistic lecture on the dangers she will soon contend with. "There are two things you need to be aware of," I said. "The first is that the tea is a lot hotter than usual since we didn't have much milk. The second is that there isn't a stopper, so be careful when you drink it."

At that point, standing right over her, I plugged the sipping spout with my thumb and gave the cup its standard sugar-mixing shake. All you physics-inclined folks already know where this is heading, but for those less engineering-geek types, or for those engineering-geek types who tend to do things without thinking, there is an interesting phenomenon that occurs when relatively cool air in a cup is suddenly shaken violently with tea that's sitting a mere degree or two from 212. It wants out.

Stacy, who was sitting one seat down, managed to give one of those Janet Leigh/Psycho kind of screams as an explosion of molten tea lava erupted from every seam of the cup and rained down on our daughter. L, on the other hand, had the uberdramatic one second of shocked silence before adding her part to the cacophony. Do you have any idea how long it takes all those writhing bubbles of liquid pain to fall silently to earth once things switch into slow-motion world? I'd say fifteen to twenty minutes.

L was quickly scooped up by Mommy while Daddy was banished from the room in shame. Fortunately L inherited Mommy's mane rather than Daddy's and other than the need for a good shampoo, the damage was minimal. Cold Elmo was called into service nonetheless - that's her Elmo-decorated owwy icepack - and other than Mommy's glare at Daddy, which is, not surprisingly, as cold as the tea was hot, things generally are all resolved. Julie Andrews might have summed it up in a more 60's psychedelic version of the song:

Tea - a drink that scalds your head.
That will bring us back to "Doh! Doh! Doh! Doh!"

Stacy calls this my typical Daddy-guilt post. But Hey! - my thumb was owwy too, you know.

Dramatic reenactment.