While trying to identify and eliminate a funky odor in the kitchen this evening, I decided it would help to burn one of my selection of homemade soy candles from years past.
This was one of the first scent combinations I came up with on my own: Amaretto and Coke. I’m not sure when was the last time I lit this candle, but I’d forgotten how much I love this scent.
You know you’ve got the #sewing bug when a stack of neglected mending suddenly looks like an opportunity to practice blind hems and buttons.
My son has had a rough few days, with his Very Loose Tooth and his ongoing fever. This morning, his tooth finally came out, so I scraped together a few minutes over my work-at-home lunch break to whip up a tooth pillow for this second tooth.
Of course, I look at this and think, God, this looks horrible. So very first draft, so proof-of-concept. My son thinks it’s awesome, though, and I guess that’s all that matters.
(He did tell me I should write a note for the Tooth Fairy to say that he wants to keep his tooth for his tooth collection. I’m afraid the Tooth Fairy is going to tell him what she tells everyone: you want the cash, you gotta surrender the tooth.)
I tried to get him to pose with his second tooth like he did with his first… but he hasn’t been feeling well, like I mentioned, so my attempts to get him to show his new and bigger tooth gap look like tortured grimaces.
We’re going to the pediatrician tomorrow, so hopefully that plus a visit from the Tooth Fairy will make him feel better.
As I stood in my kitchen this evening, cutting plastic wrap into little squares and individually wrapping brownies I’d just baked from a box mix, I felt… a little out of my element.
This is what “Pinterest Moms” do, I thought. This is what women who grew up baking dozens of Christmas cookies with their own mothers do. Me, I’m almost 40 and I’m having trouble wrapping up my little brownies into cling-wrap burritos that four-year-olds will hopefully be able to open.
A batch of soy candles was cooling on the other counter as I traipsed through the house and into the back closet to fetch a couple different types of ribbon to wrap around the brownies.
Ribbon. To wrap around brownies.
So it’s come to this, my brain snarked as I tied a little raffia bow around each wrapped brownie — again, carefully crafted for little fingers to successfully unfurl. I may as well get used to it. At least preschoolers won’t care what your bows look like.
Perhaps this is practice for future years of favors for class parties. Maybe someday I won’t feel like I’m playing house as the brownie mix poofs up out of the bowl in a dry cloud of chocolate, or as I’m cutting one red fuzzy ribbon into two thin ones because I ran out of gold raffia to tie up the rest of the brownies, or as I slowly become all thumbs and start tying single-loop bows instead of normal double-loop ones like I’d use to tie my shoe.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy baking or making treats for my son’s classmates. It’s just that it seems that so many women do this domestic stuff as naturally as breathing. It’s not just a social-media pop-culture thing, either — I know these women personally. I work with them. Several of them. They make awesome cookies and desserts and —
*pause*
Yeah, I know. I have my own wheelhouse. I don’t have to be good at everything, or feel like I have everything “under my fingers,” to use a musician’s turn of phrase. Some things take practice, repetition, and I’m sure that I’ll feel a lot more room-mother-ish once I do this sort of thing more often.
It was just kind of funny, seeing myself from the outside, studiously wrapping brownies in plastic wrap.