Dear Journal,
Good morning, everyone! Welcome to Wednesday, the highly anticipated halfway point in the work week - where beginning of the week hustle meets the end of the week longing for the weekend. Coffee, routines, and notes are behind us, and naps, snacks, and hobbies are in front of us. I think at this point, I’m just trying to do whatever I can do avoid calling it hump day. Damn, I really do hate when the perfect term for something is also the overused term for something.
Sip. The other day, Rodney stopped us in the middle of our bedtime routine, right between story time and prayers. His tone was gravely serious. “Dada,” he said, “no more X-men, and no more dragonball. Too scary.”
I stopped for a moment, giving his interjection time to sink in. Rodney is a three year old, and it can be hard getting a three year old to focus on even simple things like brushing his teeth or finishing his plate of food. So for him to remember something and bring it up in conversation on his own, this must have been weighing on him significantly.
“Al right dude, you got it.” I replied. “This must have been a tough decision for you. Thanks for bringing it up.” I felt a twinge of guilt. Officially, Rodney was too young to watch shows like X-men, Ninja Turtles, and Dragonball. But he seemed to really enjoy it and ask for it again. Did I make a bad call? Perhaps, but it was not the time to feel guilty about it. That wasn’t Rodney’s problem. The important thing was that he was making a decision that something wasn’t good for him, and he needed help sticking with it.
“Thanks for telling me Rodney. We’ll find a new show for you to watch. Maybe something with less fighting, huh?”
The next morning, Marissa and I set him up with Backyardigans. It’s a show about a bunch of animals who, as Marissa summed it up, “just get together and screw around in their backyard.” It was an instant hit.
“Sometimes I like to spy on Rodney through the reflection of the window so he doesn’t get embarrassed. He was standing up, swaying back and forth with the dance in the show,” Marissa recounted. She demonstrated, crouching low and gently swaying, swinging her arms like a skier on a leisurely ride.
And the music is good too. Backyardigans does a good job adding in different styles of music that don’t sound too brainwashy. All morning, the house was quiet. There were no fist fights, battle cries, or slashing of swords. Just the gentle, dulcet tones of age appropriate children’s programming.
The work day flew by. I took notes, attended meetings, read code, and did all the necessary preparations to keep the agile story hopper filled with well-groomed work. Before long, it was quitting time and my thoughts shifted toward dinner. I got Rodney out of his room, and together we made our way into the kitchen.
“What are we making today, dude?” I asked, fixing my apron around my waste. Rodney ignored my question, digging his favorite butter knife out of the drawer and grabbing his step ladder from the corner. “Let’s do soup,” I said, answering my own question.
We stood side-by-side at the cutting board. I chopped an onion while Rodney fiddled around with the off cuts and onion skin before I balled them up in a paper towel. Celery, carrots, and leftover Easter ham followed, eventually finding their way into hot butter at the bottom of our Dutch oven.
“OH dude,” I exclaimed. “We don’t have any bread! Is there anything worse than soup with no bread?” Rodney turned around from his spot at the sink, where he happily splashing around all under the guise of “helping me rinse kale”. He gave a sheepish smile, as if to say “whelp, good luck with that.”
It was in this moment that Rodney and I invented the greatest original recipe that has ever left our kitchen. With great pride, we present the steps to recreate speed bread. Fair warning - I haven’t had a chance to clean this up, and for the sake of reproducibility I have no other choice but to list the steps exactly as they happened.
Materials:
Procedure:
So that’s speed bread, what a wonderful accident, huh? Boy I got carried away with that one. Thanks for stopping by today. I hope you have a wonderful day.