Yesterday, Today

Growing up, the meal that brought our family together was not dinner. Sometimes it was. But we couldn’t really count on it. Dad owned his own business and ranched/farmed/irrigated on the side, and as the years went on my brothers and sister and I became involved in basically everything (not to mention the ranching and farming and irrigating), so having dinner together didn’t happen quite as much as having BREAKFAST together.
Ah, breakfast. The best meal of the day with the best food selection.
Pancakes! Eggs! Cream of Wheat! Pancakes! Pancakes! Pancakes!
Rarely do I ever order anything but breakfast when I go to Denny’s.

I once heard my mother remark that she was getting tired of the same old routine of setting the breakfast table: the butter, the sugar, the honey, the salt, the pepper, the homemade jams and jellies… only to take it all off again and be left with a mess of dishes haphazardly thrown in the sink as we all made our way out the door to school or work. I often wondered why she got sick of it. In my ignorance, I thought… ‘isn’t it her job?’
Well, yeah. It is. But now that I’m a mother, I could kick myself for not falling down at her feet when she said it and thanking her for making an effort to let us have that meal together! Waking up to the smell of bacon sizzling or walking up the stairs and catching the whiff of maple malt o’meal on the stove was literally the BEST part of my day. What’s more: it gave us all a chance to sit around the table and talk between bites. Dad always had something to say that would make us laugh (like the time he took a hold of the Rice Crispies box and scribbled out letters so that their animated health “spokes person” Timmy the Tooth Head became Timmy the Toot Head. I don’t know what was more funny -his doing it or mom’s disapproval of it). It always gave me a solid start to my day, and I’ll be danged if I’ve ever thanked my mother properly for it.
The side effect of my wonderful breakfasts is that I automatically wake up hungry. Truth be told, I’m more liable to spring out of bed if I know there’s food on the counter, even -or I should say especially -if it’s cookies.

I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that my son has this same tendency. When he crawls out of bed (which he does before his sister) and I’m the only one up (because his sister and his dad love sleep as much as Trent and I love breakfast), I take him into my arms and take in a big whiff of newly-woken up boy. It smells sweet right now and I’m trying to soak as much as I can in before he starts stinkin’. After our good morning hug, I immediately start offering him food.
“Do you want Bob?” I ask.
“SURE! A BOB!” And he bolts into the kitchen.

Bob, it must be known, is what we call bananas. The thing is: the kids were crabby one day, so I picked a banana up and started pretending it was a phone with a personality and a name: Bob.
“Bob,” I said, talking to the banana, “I want to call grandma.”
“NO!” The “banana” yelled back in an irritated tone.
“Bob,” I scolded, “You don’t tell mama’s no.”
“NO!” he yelled back.
“I’ll spank…” I warned.
“NO!” he yelled back.
So I spanked. And while I spanked “Bob” yelped out in anger.
The kids went nuts for the Bob routine, much to my immediate delight and eventual dismay. They asked for Bob all of the time. Now I’ve got a son who is addicted to Bobs and I’m going through three bunches a week.
Literally.

Yesterday, while my son was napping, I streamed a movie while I folded laundry on the couch. The movie ended up being really touching!
It was a story about an old man named Robert who lived alone. He worked in a grocery store, bagging groceries. A woman moves in across the street and asks him out on a date. Their budding romance was so adorable that I got lost in it. By the end of the movie, tears were streaming down my face and only then did I notice that my son was bopping around the living room.
“Oh,” I said, quickly wiping my blubberings from my face, “Good morning, son!”
“Goo’ morneen.”
“Can I hab a kiss?” (Don’t you hate it when you start talking like them?)
“Sure, big kiss.” He walked over to me and LAID one on me. Strangely enough it tasted exactly like maple syrup.

I got up from the couch where I’d been folding and went into the kitchen where I found a chair pushed up to the counter and

TWO spoons in the homemade maple syrup.
He woke up hungry.
I couldn’t blame him.

I woke up hungry this morning, like always, and after we ate breakfast together as a family I dropped Lacy off at preschool and took my son to get the mail.

I seriously want to send every person who sends me a REAL letter a check for $100. I mean, I can’t…. but I want to. That counts for something, right?

In any case, I’m going to send my cousin a check this week. She sent me this GEM of a card -arrived today! -and I’m going to order more. And as I opened and reopened and reopened the card this morning, I decided I’m going to forevermore pay my cousin to send me stationery (should she feel up to the task) for I’m going to send the crap out of these note cards. Be watchful lest your mailbox begins to resemble Harry Potter’s fireplace, teeming with real handwritten letters.

Perhaps I can convince my children to write letters with me. Perhaps they’ll really take to it. Perhaps then the cinnamon rolls and the frosting and the maple syrup will STAY PUT!

(Did you like my manicure in the picture above?  The lady who does my nails is only FOUR years old.  Can you believe it?  She was born with a talent.  Oh, and she gets her feelings hurt if I remove it.)