Last weekend, my son asked me to make cranberry orange muffins for him because they were going to be doing standardized testing all week at school and could take a special snack to have while filling in little ovals with #2 pencils.
Well, he didn’t say the ovals and pencil part but I remember that all too well and figured that he deserved muffins.
So, late Sunday, I toiled away making cranberry muffins without a care in the world because I knew I didn’t have to go to work the next day. This is a luxury afforded me now that I quit my job to stay home and write.
The next morning, as I packed lunches, I tucked a muffin into my son’s lunch box and then told him to remember it was in there when snack time came because he has the memory of a gnat.
Miguel: Do you have any of those wax paper bags like at the bakery?
Me: No. Why?
Miguel: Well, muffins taste better when they come in those little bags.
Me: Are you trying to pass off my homemade muffin as a bakery muffin? Are you embarrassed by my muffin?
Miguel: NO! I just really like eating muffins out of those little bags.
Throughout the day, though, I kept thinking about our conversation and wondering if homemade baked goods were no longer cool. I mean, kids his age have iPhones now – maybe they get their muffins from Starbucks.
When he got home, I asked him how testing went and he said, “Great!” because my kid is weird and enjoys standardized tests.
Me: Did you remember to have your muffin for snack?
Miguel: Yeah and it was SO good!
Me: What did other kids bring?
(I was looking for ideas, not validation. I promise.)
Miguel: It was crazy, mom! Everyone was jealous because I had a homemade muffin and they kept trying to trade for it but nobody had anything I wanted!
And it turns out that my kid isn’t the only weird one in this family because I felt like I had just received “Exceeds Expectations” on a performance evaluation.
My mother was a single mom for most of my childhood. She worked long hours and wasn’t the kind of mom who came to school parties with cupcakes and I never went to school with anything homemade in my lunch. This was not some great tragedy, especially because I was flush in Hostess Ding Dongs.
My partner and I have always worked and we’ve done our share of cupcakes and homemade brownies for our kids’ birthday celebrations at school but I had never baked anything for the kids to take to school “just because” until those muffins. It felt like such a privilege to be able to do it but I also hope my kids never take that kind of thing for granted. I worry they might.
Sometimes, if you give a kid a muffin, you are a hero for the day and then, sometimes, the kids expects more…like homemade crepes for dinner.
Yeah…don’t ask what I made for dinner last night.
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Delicious! Both the muffins and the crepes. It is great that you get to be a stay-at-home parents, but, yes, I agree, for the child, it can become easy to take that for granted. At the same time, kids take for granted most everything parents do for them— its part of being a kid. I got to do it to my parents and now my daughter can do it to me– or, more often, to my husband, the stay at home parent.
Kids are ungrateful little things.
I worry about what the kids will take for granted – in my being home and beyond. Like having a membership to the Zoo. When my two year old is unimpressed with out umpteenth trip I want to yell “you are 15 yards away from a giraffe!!! Do you not understand how cool that is?!?”
I know. I have to resist pointing out how lucky they are all the time…they have already mastered the eye roll.
I put a note in their lunches every day. The kindergartener who is only just starting to read gets a few words with a colorful picture. I know I am a hero for the day – or at least at lunch. And when I insist they eat their vegetables at dinner time, I cancel out my hero points. I live in a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately kind of house. I hope your muffin love lasts longer than a few hours.
And when I say muffin love… well, you know what I mean.
Miguel says the muffins are now “too dry”. The homemade brownies I made for lunches are “too rich” and the crepes last night might have been a bit “too much”. Who does he think he is? Goldilocks? When the bears come, I will let them eat him first.
You always crack me up! Thanks for the laughs. I love muffins. They can almost always be found in my pantry and freezer. Banana, blueberry, chocolate chip, sweet potato. Mmm.
Have you mentioned to him hat you have legions of fans that would happily consume too rich brownies, day old muffins and way too mny crepes?
God love you and your muffins, Vikki.
A word here for the long view? How ’bout: yes, those if us who are fortunate and blessed and capable enough to be giving our kids the kinds of childhoods (& attention) we want to may indeed find these luxuries taken for granted– ’til the kids leave the safe havens of their homes & childhoods, and discover just what it took to get to that muffin, and how precious and rare.
Taken for granted, perhaps, yes: granted by grace and fortune and hook and crook. I don’t doubt that when & if my kids are adults, contemplating their own parenthoods, the sum total of my longings and best efforts will be legible– the successes and the failures both. But I would love them to feel as if feeling my arms behind them to catch them when they fall is as unremarkable as the water is to the fish.
Miguel is a star. and so are you.
I grew up on t.v. dinners, fast food and the Chinese buffet on Sundays. I taught myself to cook when we decided to have kids because I wanted them to eat differently than I had. Now my personal stretch is teaching them to cook in turn. I have trouble letting them into the kitchen when I’m working in there, because I’m not that good at it and it requires concentration.
But I do hope they will grow up taking home cooking for granted and knowing how to do it for themselves.
Let the bears eat M 1st, you are so funny!
I thought he was going to ask you to make muffins for the whole class.
I’m w/GrandeMocha; I thought he wanted muffins for the whole class. That, to me, is different. When my girls ask for cookies or cupcakes to take to school, it’s for the class and I feel grateful to be able to comply. I like the idea that other children think my kids have a mom at home who bakes for them. Why do I care what children think? I shouldn’t. I do. (I send one for the teacher too because I’m a kiss-up like that.) I worry about everything I do for them being taken for granted because they have so much more than I ever dreamed of at their age(s) (except for a tv in the bedroom because ha ha ha we’re evil parents who won’t let it happen.) But, that, in turn, is why we’re parents, right? It’s up to us to bridge that oftentimes too-wide gap of have and expect/appreciated and taken for granted.
My mother didn’t bake much when I was growing up. I’d have enjoyed having something to take to school instead of the standard school lunch. But, I don’t begrudge her not being able (or, more likely, unwilling) to do this. I just would have enjoyed it.
Kids sometimes don’t know how good they have it, and no matter how good we have it, we sometimes want what we don’t have whether it is truly “better” or not. My grandmother was an old time country cook who raised and plucked her own chickens, raised and canned her own vegetables, and baked her own bread. My mom was a working mom who didn’t bake much and took a lot of pride in being modern enough and well off enough to buy baked goods. She said, as a kid, she promised herself when she started working she would buy “store bread” all the time, and she did. I, as a kid raised on Wonder Bread, think home made bread is wonderful and wish I was a better baker.