Kick Ass Wife and her quartet.
Overnight polling results based on a random sampling of women in our household who have bore four or more children suggest that Kick Ass Wife had a thoroughly enjoyable Mother’s Day.
There were gifts, including numerous handmade cards, a cookbook with recipes from kindergarteners, a pocket prayer coin, and a Nano loaded up with new tunes to help carry Kick Ass Wife through her long runs.
There was an adventurous outing that involved bike riding, tag, and a moderate-to-severe sunburn suffered by the day’s honoree.
And there was KAW sleeping uninterrupted until 8:00 a.m. — a time roughly equivalent to noon when converted to metric parenting hours — which was only possible because there was a complete absence of serving her breakfast in bed.
But dissuading the crew from getting their pint-size Paula Deen on wasn’t easy.
It never is.
Perpetual Motion’s Recipe
Like going out of their way to step on board game boxes and putting their shoes on the wrong feet, kids enter the world preprogrammed with a deep-seated desire to cook breakfast for their mothers on the second Sunday in May.
And apparently a surprise breakfast in bed isn’t as meaningful if you don’t wake your mom at first light and alert her to the fact that you’re going to make her a surprise breakfast in bed, so around dawn I intercepted the initial wave of incoming pajama-clad bogies padding down the hallway with their sights set on our bedroom.
“Hey, guys, let’s let Mom sleep,” I whispered, attempting to reroute their flight plans to the downstairs with promises of hot chocolate and Power Rangers.
“But it’s time to start baking!” said Slim, whose interest in confectionary arts — much like mine — is typically limited to consumption the other 364 days of the year.
“Yeah, we’re going to bake Mom a strawberry cake!” piped Perpetual Motion.
“Of course we are, but let’s wait until a little later,” I assured him, telling the type of blatant lie that is a cornerstone of my parenting philosophy.
Soon after Tax Credit #4 was up and in the fray, and lastly Hellcat – whose disdain for early morning nearly rivals that of her mother’s — wandered out, shooting me a look that said “You’d better shut your pie hole and fire up that oven before things get ugly.”
But I wasn’t about to be bullied by a 5-year-old. This time.
At least one thing in this picture is sweet.
Not that I don’t get the kids’ insistence. They understand they hit the mom lottery, and they want to do something nice for her. For some crazy reason cooking seems to fit the bill.
But I know that for Kick Ass Wife, sleep truly is a gift that keeps on giving the whole year through — or at least for a couple extra hours on Mother’s Day — and she deserves no less than that. (In hindsight, the Nano was probably overkill.)
So I promised the crew that if they kept quiet and let Mom sleep, we’d go get donuts.
They did. So we did.
Because breakfast in a bag is definitely tastier than breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day.
