At first glance you sympathize. If you’ve been the parent of a child under 3, you KNOW what can happen when your back is turned. A mom in the bathroom returning to a living room doused in flour could totally happen.
So at first glance you react with the typical parental “OMG. Nooooooo.” And we feel bad for the mom. Then our brain starts to do the math and it doesn’t add up.
A quiet whisper of “oh my god, oh my god” is not the typical parental reaction. Okay, she’s in shock. But the video goes on too long with her repeating the same line. There would be more questions for the kids, there would be laughing, there would be cursing. A calm wandering (with a video camera) would not be happening.
She tries to hard to make it look real. The panning of the video doesnt make sense. The flour is totally all over the living room. It’s evenly spread on the sofa. It’s on the lamp. It’s on the wall. It’s on the door. It’s on the counter. It’s on the picture.
These kids are 4 and 2. If they dragged it from the pantry and started playing with it, it would stay on the floor. A bag of flour is heavy, for a toddler. If it went out of control, they’d be giggling and screaming at the mess. Mom would know something is up by the noise coming from down the hall and she’d be able to catch it before it got to this disastrous level.
Comments are disabled on the video’s page. If this was authentic, the stream of parents offering sympathy and support would be overflowing. Somewhere along the way, the message went off track and the math didn’t make sense. When the video was approaching 1M views, 1/3 of the feedback was “didn’t like” – that tells me the BS filter went off.
The reaction on Twitter was the same. At first parents were sympathetic – then reality struck.
Mary Napoli of Michigan describes how she walked into her living room to find the couches, carpet, walls and floors completely covered in flour and her two young sons playing in the snowlike mess.
To the skeptics, she says: “The boys had a nice ‘talking to’ by me and my husband after, you can bet on that … I may never buy flour again!” [ABC]
If you want to know what really happens when kids get in the flour – have a look at Sarah Funk‘s blog.
THANK YOU!!!!!!!! I smelled a rat when I looked at the flour pattern on the couches – no way, Jose. That was adult activity, not toddlers!!!!!! I hate that viral videos are running off in the ditch – because some of the earlier ones have been hilarious and seemingly believable!!!!!!!
What’s weird is that the flour is on her jeans as well!! She made the mess!
I’m still trying to figure out how (and why) they took that bag from the kitchen to the living room. Wouldn’t they have just had the party right in the kitchen?
I bake a lot! Anyone every try to open a 5-lb bag of flour and pour into a bowl? A) The darn seals are the devil! They rarely open neatly by the time you end up getting them open. In the video, the kid puts the neatly opened bag on his head. 2) Those things are heavy! A toddler won’t have the strength to lift and drag it to that many places so as to get even coverage. More likely, they rip it open and shower themselves in one spot with it.
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