Just Another Tuesday

This morning the girls were up early, and I got up, reluctantly, to make breakfast. Lily wanted Cream of Wheat, so I made Annika cereal, too, as she generally goes along with what Lily is having, and set them up at the table so I could go back into the kitchen and make myself some much-needed coffee. When I heard Lily cackling with laughter I popped my head back out to find Annika, chortling herself, rubbing warm cereal into her hair with both of her hands. 

On some mornings, in some moods, this would make me--like Lily--burst into laughter. On other mornings, mornings like this morning, the morning after the Snow Day, a.k.a. the day I decided I wasn't actually paying too much for nursery school, this is enough to bring to tears to my eyes, or at least to make me feel as though the entire day has nowhere to go but straight downhill. I plucked Annika out of the highchair and took the half-finished cereal bowl into the kitchen while she wailed and stomped her little feet. Lily was still sitting at the table, dreamily poking at her cereal, stirring it idly, bringing a spoonful to her mouth and then putting it back in the bowl, untouched, as though to torture me. 

Annika held out her arms to me, and I picked her up, gritting my teeth as she wiped her sticky cereal hands on my sweater, snot and drool dripping onto my shoulders and shoes. I decided to remove all of our clothes--the only realistic solution to the situation--and when I went to put the clothes in the hamper, Annika disappeared into the kitchen in her diaper. I found her licking a finger and touching it to a can of Ajax that was for some reason within reach. Before I could reach her, she touched her finger to her tongue and made not the horrified look of disgust one would hope for but a considering look, as though to say: maybe just a sprinkle on a piece of buttered toast!

Lily finally managed to swallow down three or four tiny bites of her chosen breakfast and emerged from the bedroom wearing a predictably bizarre outfit of mostly navy blue fuzzy clothes, all of which were so coated in layers of dog fur that even I was embarrassed. I couldn't find a lint roller, and I couldn't find a roll of tape, so I told Lily that I would brush her off at school, where there was lots of tape, but that we had to leave, at which point she said, "Mama, I'm so, so hungry," and I noticed Annika feeding Scout segments of clementine she'd found somewhere in the apartment. They looked partially fossilized.

I'm not sure what my point is. I believe there actually isn't one, or a moral, or anything more to add except that at the bookend of this day, when I arranged the little hamburgers that had been handsomely rejected the night before by a number of discriminating children on a plate on the counter and bent to tie my shoe, Scout managed in one surprisingly graceful motion to swoop up behind me, consume three in one miraculous bite, and slink out as fast as it is possible to slink to a protected spot under the dining room table where he alternately licked his paws and rolled around on his back, leaving more tufts of white fur on the floor, awaiting tomorrow morning's preparations.