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Grace

Posted on by Beth Hull

By the time I’ve slaved over a pot of burnt rice and battled the side leg tackles of my toddler, I’m ready to chow down on the (unburned, new batch of) rice and curry stir fry cooked by loving Husband. Throw plates on the table, sweep dead flower petals to the side, plonk down a beer and call it a meal.

Fortunately we’ve already instilled in our daughter a deeply ingrained love of prayer, otherwise we’d be eating like heathens in front of an episode of Lost without any form of pomp or circumstance…which is exactly how we used to do things. What I thought would be a nice family routine of saying a quick prayer before dinner has turned into a breakfast-lunch-snack-and-dinner affair, complete with thanking God for the food and pretty much every single person we know on this earth. Oh, and the animals too. Our grace goes something like this:

Parent (either Husband or me): Dear God, thank you for this food.

[pause]

Z: Pop Pop.

Parent: And Pop Pop.

Z: Meh-nie.

Parent: And Melanie.

Z: Hay-son.

Parent: And Harrison.

Z: Gamma.

Parent: And Grandma.

And so on, until we finish thanking God for the grandparents, the cat, the dogs next door, Mama, Daddy, and finally, Z herself. Then sometimes we loop back to the cat.

The same thing happens at nighttime prayers. Then yesterday as I put her down in her crib for naptime and her eyes were drooping, she popped her little head up and said, “Gace!” [translation: Grace].

This is hard to admit in front of the Public and God and Everyone Else (including my mother), but I pretended not to know what she was talking about.

It sounds bad, I know. But her little eyes were practically shut, and she would have been wide awake by the end of a recital of the contents of my address book (and don’t forget the animals). Plus I work so hard to get her to sleep sometimes; if she’s already there on her own, I don’t want to mess with that. Sometimes I’ll go to extreme and superstitious lengths to preserve what I have come to think of as our Routine.

So I said a quick prayer for her, because I believe you can just say, “Hey God, thanks for my beautiful kid,” whenever you feel like it.

Five o’Clock Disco Breakdown

Posted on by Beth Hull

When five o’clock rolls around, it’s time to dance. “It’s five o’clock!” I shout, and you immediately start your funny shuffle, some cross between the Running Man and the Moon Walk. “Clear the dance floor!” I say, kicking books, stuffed animals, and assorted wooden puzzle pieces. I give a particularly rough kick to any toy that uses batteries and makes noise, hoping it will “accidentally” break. Then, with a good beat blasting, we dance.

You prefer to dance in my arms, face to face, bouncing your own exaggerated bounces until I give in and jump up and down. You squeal, smiling wide, letting go for a second to clap your hands. Once my back is about to give out, I finally put you down and hold your hands, or one of your hands and one of Mr. Penguin’s hands–er, wings. We dance in a circle, and I sing “Ring Around the Rosie” to a disco beat. Or we dance facing each other. I do the can-can, you kick your legs out in an approximation of the can-can that looks more like a goose-step.

It’s fun when Daddy joins us. We all spin, shake our groove thangs, and laugh a lot. The perfect end to a long day.

Kitchen ‘Capades

Posted on by Beth Hull

This morning I was greeted in the kitchen by the Mt. Everest of dishes, looming precipitously above me and sucking up all the oxygen with their stench. Didn’t I JUST do these? I wondered. Hasn’t there been enough kitchen cleaning for one week? Does it never end? I know I’m not the first stay-at-homie to ponder these philosophical quandaries. With my easy solution, perhaps I’ll be the last.

For those of you interested in my ground-breaking solution, here it is: stop eating. No food means no dishes. I know I can certainly survive until the Fourth of July off of my stomach fat alone, not even needing to use up the fat stores from other parts until much later. Z can survive off the handouts she gets at playdates. Seriously, the kid walks into a stranger’s house and starts begging. I try to convince the other moms that she does eat at home, but they don’t believe me. So I may as well stop feeding her and make the rounds to the other toddlers’ houses. And Husband? He barely eats anyway, somehow getting through an entire day on three cookies. In fact, he doesn’t even have to eat those cookies. He takes them to work, then brings them home; he magically absorbs whatever calories he needs just from carrying them. I magically absorb whatever calories I don’t need just by looking at air.

But this isn’t an article intended to poke fun at my weight, as easy as that is right now. I’m mystified by the kitchen, and the dishes inside it, and how they seem to dirty themselves through the very virtue of being dishes. Perhaps I don’t get it because I don’t cook. So when I see the dishes it’s magical in an Oh-No-Voldemort-Just-Apparated-In-My-Kitchen sort of way.

When I do finally tackle the mess, usually in the morning (I mean really, who wants to waste Z’s precious bedtime hours cleaning?), I vow to never again let it get this bad. “Never,” I say, scrubbing a chunk of enchilada off the rim of a plate. All good intentions are lost as soon as Z looks “thoughtful” and needs a new diaper. My child protects me from doing too much work because after the diaper change she wants a story. And in the face of all those dishes, reading Rosemary Wells’s Bunny Planet trilogy forty-six times sounds like nirvana.