Two years. Wow. Have they flown by so quickly?
I have been a mother for two years. And everyday has been a joy for me. Some days are longer than others and some nights more wakeful. But not a day goes by without me being thankful that I have the opportunity to be a mother to this little buddy of mine.
It’s a cliche uttered by all parents but man, can time slow down and let me enjoy being a mother to my baby (read: toddler) just a little more?
I love everything about this phase. He’s in a delightful age where he is trying to string complete sentences, enjoys cuddling up to me (“sit on mama lap!”, “mama carry!” etc), loves reading books, dances to music awkwardly but oh-so-passionately, finishes the sentences from his favourite books and laughs all the time. He kisses us readily, leans his head so lovingly on our shoulders and grins widely when I pick him up after work.
Sure, there are the usual tantrums. There are the odd outbursts which we cannot account for. But these incidents are generally the exception, not the norm.
Over the past weekend, we celebrated his birthday with our families. There is no fancy set up, no elaborate party, no artistically arranged cake/dessert table, no expensive goody bags, no professional photography. We kept it simple, deliberately: just food, the people who love him and us, and cakes. That’s what I remember of my childhood birthdays and that’s how I want him to remember his.
Call us crazy but Mr Thick and I also decided to make him a cake from scratch. Hah, us? He loves trains, so we thought we’d made a train cake. The internet made it look so easy! I baked the lemon pound cake and made the swiss buttercream frosting. I coloured the frosting and then turned everything over to the cake engineer. He sat at the dining table and painstakingly sliced, cut, drilled and frosted the cake.
The result? A really awful looking cake. REALLY. UGLY. Absolutely nothing like what we had intended. My girlfriend jokingly called it the “Pinterest fail”. But hey, we had fun doing it together and had a good laugh at what terrible bakers we make.
And then, MAGIC. Aidan laid his eyes on the cake and shouted out in glee, “Oh train!”
He couldn’t keep his eyes off of the cake, as ugly as it was, and dug at it with his spoon happily. And over the following days, he would open up the fridge and ask for “Thomas train cake”.
And this was how I knew that this is our family: the imperfect love that makes us us.
Happy birthday to my boo boo. Mama and Papa love you to the moon and back (multiply by infinite times).
Yannisms 