Things are happening very quickly around here. Last week nobody in my house had a job. Then on Friday, Simone got an interview, Monday she got a job, and Tuesday she started work. All was right with the world once again, as Simone headed off to the office for her first day (just 18 hours after being offered the position) and I got ready to be a stay-at-home Tenor Dad once again.
Step One: Drop Ruby off at preschool.
Step Two: Enjoy a relaxing morning while Edward naps.
Step Three: Pick up Ruby, feed her lunch, and then bake cookies all afternoon.
Step one went really well. It was immediately following step one that things went downhill. It quickly became clear to me that, having been basically gone for the past three months, I was no longer familiar with the day to day routines of my children. I knew, for instance, that Edward needed his antibiotics for his ear infection, but I had no idea if Simone had given them to him before she left or not. Since she was at work and not answering her phone, I spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out if it was better to skip a dose or antibiotics, or to double up. On which side of caution should I err?
It was right about when I finally figured out that he had not had his medicine yet that the school called to tell me Ruby had conjunctivitis and I needed to pick her up right away. So we packed into the car and picked Ruby up from school. She was very upset to be taken home early, and even more upset that Mommy was not home to greet her. I swear she looked out the window to see if Mommy was home every twenty minutes, all day long, even though I told her it would be another seven hours.
I decided to move on to step three and get lunch ready. This was harder than I had supposed, because last week Baby Edward was fairly stationary. As of yesterday, he can suddenly crawl around the apartment very well and do whatever he likes. And what he likes is to destroy and/or eat things. Inappropriate things. Mostly cats and plastic bags.
I made lunch for a while, stopping every few seconds to put the baby back to his starting point. Eventually I just put him in his seat and poured half a container of puffs onto his tray and let him go to town. For those of you without children, puffs are melt-in-your-mouth baby snacks that are the infant equivalent of crack. Well, we made it through lunch, and we even successfully wrapped Mommy’s Christmas presents, so it was time to tackle the baking of the eight batches of cookies we had planned out for the week.
First up were the Hershey Kiss peanut butter cookies that everyone loves. Ruby had picked them out special to help with, so we got all the ingredients together and started mixing them up with the electric mixer. It was at this point that the electric mixer broke. And by broke I do not mean “stopped working.” By broke I mean the piece of plastic that holds in the beaters snapped off and the beaters went shooting across the kitchen, spraying peanut butter batter in their wake. Luckily the cookies were basically mixed at that point, so we were able to finish them up, but that left us with no way to finish the other seven batches of cookies, so instead we watched “Ernest Saves Christmas” while Baby Edward tried to unwrap all of the presents and eat the tree.
It was around this time that Ruby got very concerned that if we left the milk out for Santa with the cookies we had just baked, it would go bad. So she asked if we could just leave the milk in the fridge with a note for Santa, telling him where the milk was. Also, we could leave him a note as to where the glasses were in the cabinet, so he could just get his own milk. What were we, his slaves? He’s lucky we didn’t just leave the cookie ingredients out on the counter with a recipe and an arrow pointing to the stove.
Eventually Simone did get home, and said her day was basically just a training day. Unfortunately it sounded a lot more boring than the movie “Training Day,” but that’s just how life is sometimes. So I guess Simone will go back to work tomorrow, and we will stay home and try and make more cookies. I’ll let you know how it goes.