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Yep, its official, the flower monkey has definitely vomited in Christi’s kitchen.
Christi and Kenny have gone off to work and now Fuji, my granddog, and I are standing in the kitchen, me with a cup of coffee, Fuji with the crumbs of a just eaten treat on her lips, surveying the mass chaos of oranges and purples that are supposed to somehow morph themselves into wedding reception decor. This is where I begin to wonder what the heck I was thinking. I’m an accountant for crying out loud. We don’t do creative little flower arrangements; we do financial statements. We don’t take a handful of flowers and some ribbon and make something beautiful; we put hard numbers into pre-decided holes to come up with a concrete, already known by someone, answer. But nope, here I stand in the silent house, staring at the debris of a flower monkey’s stomach with Fuji eyeing me expectantly. In reality, Fuji is just hoping if she stares at me intently I will give her yet another treat but in my current state of overwhelming anxiety over falling short in the “we can do it” Mom category in Christi’s eyes, even the dog’s expectant look has turned critical.
Living in a world of “we can just” has sometimes been to my advantage. Take the time my friend Rhonda needed her son Kyle to be a Tuna for the school alphabet play. All we could find was a dinosaur costume pattern but I told her “don’t worry, we can just free hand some flippers on the legs and change the fabric colors and viola, we have a Tuna!” It was great fun and the flippers actually were attached to the legs so when Kyle walked it looked like they were flipping him along.
Bolstered with the confidence that if I could turn a dinosaur into a tuna I could surely turn the debris from a flower monkey’s stomach into beautiful flower arrangements for Christi’s reception, I grabbed up some coppery orange ribbon and set to work. Over next few days Christi and I cleaned glass, wired flowers, covered floral foam and even painted several pieces with the black paint left over from her bathroom renovation. And finally after only two smacks to the forehead from a silver hanging hook in Hobby Lobby (yes, the same one both times), a few burns on a hot glue gun, a couple of pinches from a pair of wire cutters and more than a few rounds of laughter (potentially caused by the slight buzz from not opening the garage door when painting the floral foams) Christi and I stood in her kitchen marveling at the beautiful flower arrangements we had created. A few more hours and all our hard work was packed up in three gray Rubbermaid bins awaiting their trip to Moab.
The Allen women had conquered the mound of flower monkey debris and we were riding high on our new found Flower Power!
