"Pa-Tone"

My family has always enjoyed popcorn. I have early memories of waiting impatiently for our snack as I listened to the oil crackle, the kernels explode and the pot scraping back and forth across the eye of the stove. I always hoped Mom would accidentally put in too many kernels because I loved it when the pot would fill up so high that the lid was pushed up on a mountain of white popcorn.

My mom and my dad still enjoy popcorn regularly. They snack on it most every Sunday night after church and sometimes pop some up on a weeknight or when friends are visiting. So when Mom came across this ridiculously enormous bag of popcorn but I'm sure she thought it was a Great Deal. I don't know where she found it or who helped her load it into her car but somehow she managed to bring home fifty pounds of popcorn kernels.

I need to ask her how long it took to begin to realize the number of years it might take to consume fifty pounds of popcorn kernels.

All that to say, I am the now proud owner of approximately twenty pounds of un-popped popcorn. And as much as we enjoy a bowl of popcorn every now and then, there is no way we're going to polish off that supply any time soon. So we've found another great use for popcorn kernels.



Some might call this something fancy like "sensory development". But I just know that pulling out a big tub of popcorn is a good way for me to distract a cranky toddler while I'm trying to finish dinner. Bennett enjoys scooping and dumping the kernels from one container to another.



Sure, he doesn't have perfect aim and we usually have to sweep a little after he is finished playing, but it is totally worth it for an uninterrupted ten or fifteen minutes. And it's not like we're going to exhaust the supply any time soon. Yaknowwhaddamean?


A couple of weeks ago I decided to show my little man what those nifty little seeds can turn into. From his perch on my hip he watched through the glass lid as the kernals began to pop. He found it quite hilarious. "Pop! Pop! Woohoo!"

And we both enjoyed the "pa-tone" very much. Yum!