Ahhh, Sunday morning.

Moose is out golfing. I am cleaning the living room. Enough about the boring people in the house. What are those kids doing, you ask? Well, I'm here to tell you.

They are playing Iron Chef with their stuffed animals.

The set up went something like this:

Alton Brown: a parrot (which made me crack up! but you should know my kids adore him).

The Chairman: a green and black furry spider that is hanging over the stadium. (aren't they clever!)

Mario Batali: a penguin that sings "Honey YOU, are my Shining Star...don't you go away."

Kat Cora: a cat. Really, what can you do with that one? At least it is one of the cats Miss M and I sewed wings on while playing Catwings one day. (If you haven't read those books by Ursula K. LeGuin you really must.)

Bobby Flay: a horse because it was the most Southwestern thing they could find in the drawer.

Masahara Morimoto: (my personal fave) is a rabbit that they made pipe cleaner glasses for.

Michael Symon: is a porcupine in some funny sense of irony.

The judges include another winged cat (totally impartial) and a tiger. "Jeffery" is the only judge they know by name and he is a big, blue monster thing with a mouth that opens wide and deep so you can shove your pajamas inside his body. This also cracked me up.

I left them to play a bit and came down to refill my coffee and to keep moving with my own version of Life-Imitating-TV (take your pick of any of those shows where the crew steps into the lives of chronically cluttery people and organizes their entire lives in 30 minutes). I went back upstairs to drop off things that belong up there and to see how the battle was raging. Here is what I was told (please keep in mind that most of this sounded like Miss M and Big C finishing each other's sentences):

Mom! You can't just go challenge an Iron Chef like that. First we are setting up our own restaurant so we can become well-known chefs. The idea at our restaurant is you get a piece of paper with a list of main ingredients and you have to pick just one. And then the chef makes you a surprise dish with that ingredient. (Here, Little C interjects.) But you can also write down things you DON'T like and the chef won't use those. We thought people that like the show would want to eat there and it would be good practice to be on Iron Chef.

And I, being in a clutter-buster kind of mood and buzzed on caffeine, looked around. Two bedrooms and the hallway are all covered in make-shift tables, pretend food, and stuffed animals. Almost everything in me wanted to tell them to contain the mess in one room and sternly remind them that they will have to clean up the mess before bedtime. But, like that little bit of Hope left in Pandora's box, the wiser part of myself forced out a smile and simply asked if they needed anything from the kitchen. "Do we have any fat netting?" one asked. "I'll see what I can find," I answered.