I love to cook. Love it.
I love creating something to feed my family that is healthy and tastes delicious. This makes me happy.
However, I don’t love cooking dinner most nights. Really, I rather loathe it in fact.
Largely this is my own fault, because inevitably the days I dread the approach of the dinner hour are the days when I’ve hardly given a thought to what I’m going to cook that night and have no protein thawed and panic begins to set in right about the time my husband asks, “So, what’s the dinner plan?”
Ugh. I cringe just writing about that moment. Note to self: Get better at meal planning.
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I really, truly, absolutely love the artistic mind of my oldest girl. I love that she wants to create things and that she has a clear vision of how she wants her masterpieces to turn out. I love that, when she asks for something and I tell her we don’t have one, her mind will often go directly to, “But we can make one!”
I don’t so much love when said girl determines that she, oh say, wants a Cinderella Dress “sewn” out of a single piece of blue yarn,
or a Rapunzel made from some purple and gold pom poms, or a Goony Bird drawn just so, or a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer made out of a bunch of random wrapping paper scraps.
Because heaven forbid the adult who helps her attain her creative goal is not totally in sync with her vision. She is very particular, that girl is.
Just today she went through at least three pieces of construction paper to “practice” drawing a snow man. Love.
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Finally, I love the stage that sweet Baby Sis is in right now. Love. It.
She is becoming so much more interactive and her sweet little personality is starting to shine.
She is doing some signs (“more” and “all done”), she plays little games, she responds to her name, she does this crazy, adorable I-just-want-to-eat-her-up head nodding thing that totally melts me every time, and she’s crawling everywhere.
And, oh yeah, she’s crawling everywhere.
You may think I’m a horrible mom for saying this, but I as much as I L-O-V-E this baby phase, I really don’t love this baby phase.
I do not love that I can’t set her on the floor for five minutes to make a coffee in the morning without her crawling away while my back is turned and me realizing it and panicking, “Crap! I don’t think I vacuumed under the table after dinner last night!” and running to get her just in time to save her from aspirating some petrified chunk of the previous night’s dinner that was dropped on the floor by one of her sisters (just one of many reasons I miss having a dog, by the way).
Repeat a variation of this scenario in any room of the house, any time I set her on the floor, all. day. long.
She wants to move. She wants to be where her sisters are and do what they’re doing.
She wants to explore.
I know, I know. Of course she wants to explore. I just wish exploring in this phase didn’t have to include putting every darn thing she sees into her mouth. As you probably know if you’ve read many of my previous posts, I have a wee bit of a choking phobia.
And it doesn’t help that we recently had a bit of a choking scare with her and now I am pretty much afraid to put her on the floor at all if I can’t be watching her like a hawk the whole time. I’m developing tendonitis or something in my elbow from carrying her 22 pounds of adorable around all day long. I’m serious. Neurotic much?
So far with all three of my kids, this time between 9 and 18-ish months, when mobility is advanced so much more than reasoning, has been my least favorite phase. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit it, but oh it is so true!
I suppose that’s just the nature of motherhood though. Even though there are some things about it that I really don’t love, don’t like, can’t stand, etc., in the grand scheme of things, I love it. I don’t love everything about it. But oh, how I do love it.
