Saturday Mornings: Part 3--Pancakes & Oranges Gone Wrong

Sometimes on a Saturday morning, Aaron tries to let me sleep in. If he takes the kids out, I can, and I do. Even though there is a part of me that wants to wake up and have breakfast in bed with a book, all by myself.

But if they all stay home, I can't do it. Even with the bedroom door shut, the hallway door shut, even if he'll only let them play in the kitchen, the farthest room from our bedroom, I can still hear them. Our house isn't that big. And they are loud. And I feel bad.

I hate that.

Because Aaron, well, he can sleep through anything. There could be a tornado, an earthquake and 3 kids screaming in the next room, and he'd be happily sawing logs, knowing I was letting him sleep in and therefore handling it. Is this the difference between a daddy and a mommy, or just the difference between Aaron and I?

Whatever it is, I wish it would change.

But it doesn't. So this Saturday morning I walked into the kitchen and Aaron said, "you can go back to bed sweetie. I've got the kids." Oh sweet man, I wish that I could have. Instead, I let him get me coffee and watched as he tried to make pancakes.

Aaron is not the cook in our house. He does lots of other things very well. Cooking is not one of them. He has a few dishes: eggs, burritos, sandwiches, toast. Pancakes are not on the list. But sometimes he still tries. It didn't go too well. (I promised him I wouldn't poke fun at his pancakes in this post. So I stop here.)

We went with our old standby instead: soft boiled eggs. You just can't miss with a good soft boiled egg. They are on the menu for most of our Saturday morning breakfasts.

Meanwhile, Lilly was having her first breakfast.

James and William were drawing.

Then there was some wrestling.

And finally, we sat down to eat.

4 of us ate eggs and toast, and William just had toast. He's not an egg man.

Lilly finished her second breakfast (she's really a hobbit) and went off to play.

William wanted some oranges. I had cut up a few and without thinking, I spponed some onto his plate. The plate that had been for his toast. The plate that had toast crumbs on it. The toast crumbs that now got on his oranges.

O Lord have mercy.

I should have seen that coming. I have been doing this long enough now that I should have known a toast crumb on an orange is the equivalent to setting a bowl of smelly, rotten meat in front of him. Or feces. Or a bowl of barf. Or something so heinous you would never, ever, be able to eat it.

See that little, tiny toast crumb? It did William in.

To be fair, he isn't always this insane. A late bedtime = a difficult morning. And I wish that I could say that all I had to do was say in a firm voice, "William, you stop crying right now and eat those oranges or I'll knock your block off!" and he shaped right up. Nope. I just said, "fine, I'll eat your oranges. You're done."

Because mostly I was.

I guess I should have slept in a little longer.

It was 8:30 am

About an hour later, Lilly went down for a nap, the boys were playing trains on the back porch, and Aaron and I reheated our coffee, sat down in the living room, picked up the latest issue of Sunset magazine and the last issue of Cookie and breathed out, slowly. Ahhhhhh.

For an hour, we sat, we talked, we came up with plans for our new patio and all was right with the world. Before we had kids, we would relax for the entirety of a Saturday morning. Now, an hour uninterrupted feels about like an eternity.

Sometimes it takes a while to get things right. That's OK, there are lots more Saturdays to come. Maybe I'll even teach Aaron how to make pancakes.