Nonpareils Overboard!

On Wednesday morning, there was an explosion in my kitchen. We have guests visiting us this weekend, and I was busy readying my kitchen for their arrival. This involved some cleaning, dusting and restocking all the essential foods they might want to dip into. As I reached up to a high shelf in my pantry to retrieve a bag of sugar (with the hopes of refilling my sugar bowl), I accidentally knocked down my package of nonpareils.

What happened next can really only be called a Nonpareil Explosion. Check out the photo above. Nonpareils (which by the way are those little multicolored sugary beads that you put atop cakes, ice cream and other desserts to make them look festive) went everywhere in my kitchen. This photo really just shows the center of the explosion. The nonpareil blast was extensive (probably since the canister fell from a height above my head onto the ground) and those bright little beads of sugar flew everywhere.

My trusty sidekick, the Lima Bean, was of course by my side when this all happened. She thought it was amazing and you could just see the wheels in her 17-month-old brain processing the event. I explained to her that I had made a big mess and needed to clean it up. She then said "Boom!" and made great sweeping hand motions across the floor to show how the nonpareils had flown everywhere. A couple minutes later, she let out another "Boom!" and performed another demonstration of the incident. It was very cute to see her try and "discuss" what had happened, using her limited toddler vocabulary.

As I was cleaning I told Lima to try not to walk in the nonpareils. She was actually very, very good about listening to this direction. But since they were EVERYWHERE, she did end up with a lot stuck to the bottoms of her feet. When I went to clean off her feet, the little candies slid right off but they left some colored marks.



Lima actually loved this little explosion and happily let out another "Boom!" when I was telling Win about it later at dinner. So at least someone got some entertainment value out of the mess.

It took a while, but I think I got all of the nonpareils cleaned up. The blast radius was huge, so if a stray nonpareil rolls into your living room, you now know where it came from.