Shoes and Pie


There was this letter-to-an-advice-columnist that was being passed around where a married woman with no kids admitted that she assumed her friends with kids weren’t all that busy, that kids can’t possibly take as much of her time as she claimed, and that the mom was just a shitty friend. Obviously, everyone jumped on her, blah blah blah, but it really is impossible to describe what part of your life gets shitcanned when you’re dealing with insane three foot tall people.

Uncle Ian brought home tiny pumpkins, and Barnaby has been in love with them. He makes houses out of them, makes his animals talk to them, etc. Finally, he decided that the big pumpkin should be turned into pie and bread. Always up for a teachable moment, and to make a schmuck out of myself, I agreed. I figured a pumpkin is just another squash, so I cut up the big one (a small one by jack-o-lantern measure), got out the seeds and “yuck” and steamed them on the stove for about 45 minutes. I scraped out the meat and threw it in the quisinart. Barnaby helped with all of this, including scraping out the seeds with a spoon.

I’ve made enough pie in my life to be able to throw together a crust pretty quickly, but it needed to sit in the fridge, and then it took me a while to suss out the filling, which I also sorta threw together. Three eggs, some milk, some organic, off-the-tree maple syrup, 1/2 cup of brown sugar, couple tablespoons of flour and two cups of punkin… plus spices. I started digging through my cabinet, and I found some cinnamon sticks, some whole cloves, some whole nutmeg and some ground ginger, so I dumped a bunch of it into my spice grinder and then threw it in the filling.

By now, Barnaby had to go to bed, so I blind baked the crust and then we were up forever waiting for the actual pie to cook. But he really, really wanted it for breakfast, and I’m a sucker for “really, really”.

Anyway, Marlena discovered her hands yesterday, and Barnaby, this morning, was teaching her how to play in her bouncy seat. He was so excited by it that he couldn’t stop running in circles around her seat and bringing her more toys and screaming, it was just lovely. I moved her bouncy seat on to the dining room table so Barnaby could eat his pie.

He took one bite and said it tasted “good”. I cut him off another bite, and he said no, and tried to wipe the pie off the fork. While he was drinking, he was staring at the pie, and kept spilling his drink on his lap, and he asked several times if he could take Marlena in the other room, because he’s obsessed with her playing. I was like, “Kiddo! You can play with her here while you eat the pie we made together! I’ll run up and get you a new shirt and pants”

He followed me in the living room and Jordana said, “do you want to babysit Marlena for a minute?” and he said, “YEAH!” and ran back in the dining room. A few seconds later, he walked back in the living room with a terrible look on his face… and puked. In the end, it was simply the very sight of the pumpkin pie that turned his stomach so much that he couldn’t be in the same room with it, even though his new toy, Marlena, was sitting in there.

This is what people without kids don’t understand. It isn’t *only* that they will take off the right shoe you just put on while you’re trying to get on the left, it’s that some little kids have feelings that go utterly beyond the scope of what is reasonable. Some kids will play on the playground with twenty other kids, bumping into each other and being crazy, and then one little thing will switch and they’ll start crying because, the forty fifth time it happened, being bumped into is suddenly no fun.

When people are like, “just put it in front of him, he’ll eat it eventually, you can’t give in so fast”, I just feel crazy. It isn’t that he won’t try it, we can get him to *try* it. But if the texture is weird, HE. WILL. VOMIT. I made him some toast, and I was explaining to him that I made a mistake, the pie wasn’t very sweet and was VERY spicy, and he said, “That isn’t it, daddy. I like the way it tastes.” When pressed, he finally said, “It was too crusty, and too smushy in my mouth” and then he dry-heaved.

So, anyway. This is why I’m sometimes late to shit. It’s because my kid just barfed, and he won’t put on his shoes.