What's the big deal?

In which I try to remember who I'm working for.

It's 6AM on Tuesday morning. I'm standing in the kitchen, in the dark, swearing at a tortilla.

My toddler's not a picky eater. Not by measure of any of the horror stories I hear about children who go weeks refusing to consume anything but mac and cheese. But he does go through phases. He begrudgingly takes his required three bites of chicken then eagerly gobbles up a cup of pasta, or baked apples, or melon (but only if it's warm).

He's currently in a tortilla phase—butter and tortilla sandwich bites. These evolved from first serving him tortillas torn up into manageable bite size. We then discovered he liked to use them to scoop up copious amounts of butter, which is great for getting calories into a growing boy, but also resulted in more butter-smudged furniture than I was willing to deal with.

So I decided to improve on my buttered-tortilla delivery method and here I am, spreading knobs of butter into a folded-over tortilla and carefully cutting it up into bite-size sandwiches. Despite being as gentle and careful as I can, the softening butter makes the top layer of tortilla slide around as I cut. Pressing harder squeezes butter out of the tortilla and onto the plate, the knife, my fingers. The small tortilla pieces come apart in flaky layers and stick to my buttery fingers and I feel an intense urge to toss the whole plate in the trash, but that would invalidate all my effort thus far. Hence, the swearing.

The first words out of my son's mouth when he wakes up are, "Mama. Ba-na." The latter means "banana" and while I correct him every time, I'm painfully aware that the cuteness of that missing syllable will be missed one day not too far from now.

"You want banana? Okay! Let's have breakfast!" I sit him down at the table and set before him this morning's masterpiece: sliced bananas, ground beef and baked apples, and tiny square butter tortilla sandwich bites, all neatly arranged on his geometrically-divided, phthalate-free silicone suction plate like something out of a baby-led weaning cookbook. I hand him a spoon and go to grab my coffee.

I turn around and, to my delight, see kiddo happily spooning away—until I notice what he's doing.

My son is meticulously scooping all of his food on his plate into one polygon-shaped compartment. My previously-Instagram-worthy divided plate arrangement has degenerated into a pile of food that looks like last night's leftovers, scraped into the bin.

"No! No, oh, come on." I rush over and wrestle the spoon from him, try briefly and desperately to separate banana mush from apple mush, and realize all hope is lost. What is he doing? I think, He's never done this before. Is this a phase? Is this okay?

My husband comes to the table and takes one look at the commotion, my face, and our son's plate. "What's the big deal?" he asks nonchalantly, "Give him back the spoon. Let the man scoop."

I do, and I sit down at the table, feeling equal parts mystified and dejected. I watch as perfectly square little butter tortilla sandwiches are transferred by heaping spoonful into the mishmash of apple, banana, ground beef, and their soggy tortilla predecessors. My son stirs diligently, then begins transferring the whole mess again into another compartment on his plate.

"Are you going to eat any of that?" I ask. Almost as if in response, he brings the spoon to his mouth and eats—one, single, solitary piece of apple. Then he smiles.

My husband digs in to his eggs. The dim glow of the dining room pendant light creates a comforting pre-sunrise cocoon around us, a moment's pause before the hubbub of another day the Lord has made. This small space is filled with the smell of coffee, the tink of plates, and the quiet smushing sound of various foods being stirred together into beautiful chaos on a silicone plate.

Well, what’s the big deal? I think to myself. This moment, this mess, like "ba-na," is fleeting. We only have the time that the Lord has given us. And besides, I don't even have Instagram.