After five years of wiping noses, tying shoes, mending holes in sleeper feet and attending T-ball games, I finally ventured to the final frontier of domesticity—I baked a cake from scratch. (Well, one of the ingredients might have been Betty Crocker’s Super Moist Cake Mix, but it was still a major step.) I needed to make it extra spectacular, because today my baby girl transcended into the Year of the Terrible Two—the first year we parents must acknowledge that our babies aren’t really babies anymore.
I popped the cake in the oven, set the timer and asked Doug to take it out in twenty-eight minutes. I had an errand to run, and when I came home, the cake was cooling on the counter looking like a deflated balloon, like a little nymph jumped in the middle and was sucked right in.
Doug and I stared at it curiously. “You know, I think I heard once if you talk too loud, a cake sinks,” I speculated. “The next time I take a cake out of the oven, no one is allowed to speak.”
He just stared at it silently. Doug’s bout as Mr. Mom hasn’t been kind to him. He learned very quickly that children don’t come with volume control. “Not two seconds go by that they don’t want something,” he complains nearly every time I come home from work. “Daddy, can we go outside? Tyler’s not sharing his (everything that happens to be in his vicinity)! Can I have juice? Can I have a cupcake? Can I paint my toenails? Why? WHY? WWHHHYY?”
After a long moment, he finally snapped out of his silence and declared, “In my next life, I’m coming back as a cake.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because when a cake’s around, everyone has to shut up!”
Happy Birthday to my Anna, who, with the help of her brother and sister, most undoubtedly will never shut up—especially when there’s a cake around.