Skip to main content

Adventures with the Chocolate Monster

As it turns out, after I made my first cake I was somehow transformed into a regular Betty Crocker.

The UrbanBaby and I decided to bake Molly's Winning Hearts and Minds Cake this morning. We dedicated it to a happy Mr. Urban and some daring friends that were visiting us for dinner tonight.

As it also turns out, baking a chocolate cake turns the otherwise mild tempered UrbanBaby into Stitch. 



My grand plans to keep my daughter a stranger to delicious foods and keep her on a strict diet of steamed and unsalted vegetables, fruits and water went out with the poopy diapers months ago. Now she regularly swings open the fridge door looking for “Ishe Cream” and checks my purse for “Treats”.

So this morning, no sooner had the ONE POUND dark chocolate bar exposed himself to us, that my daughter, first gently and then frantically started repeating “give me, give me”.

I caved in with a little sliver and then things got really bad. Precious tears started rolling as she began crawling out of her highchair with the fierce mightiness of a tiny monster, onto the counter, headed for the huge mound of shaved chocolate.


As any sane mother would do, I grabbed the closest iPhone to document the moment, just as Mr. Urban rushed through the front door as though to pull us out of a burning house. He was catching up on some errands in the garage, which is two flights of stairs and a ton of concrete away. One look at the screaming baby crawling on to the counter and her mother photographing her, and you can imagine the look on his face. I cheerfully explained that anxiety goes along with trying new activities with the little ones. It’s “Perfectly Natural”, it’s “Part of the Fun” I said authoritatively, trying in vane to be heard over the UrbanBaby’s voice.

As in all wonderful adventures, there were ups and downs, but we had a lopsided chocolate cake and other goodies to enjoy with our friends at the end of the day.


Hope there is some chocolate in your weekend too.

Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 27, 2010 at 2:05 AM

    Hilarious story! So UrbanBaby is potty trained? Amazing. We tried too but it was very stressful for my sweet little boy. We'll try again in a few weeks. --Z

    ReplyDelete
  2. Urban GirlJune 27, 2010 at 3:12 PM

    HI Z. First, thank you for your comment. 2nd, and regarding Potty Training, we haven't ventured there yet. I think she is ready, but I am not as brave as you :) She is however very good as using her potty for a reading chair while I shower.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FORTY THREE YEARS, SEVEN MONTHS AND FORTY DAYS

My life and the life of every Iranian I know,  is bookended by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It doesn't matter that I was barely old enough to remember this historic event or that I spent the decades that followed it, far far away from Iran, the Revolution of 1979 is a heavy, tacky, cruel bookend that defines who we used to be, who we are and the recurring nightmares and dreams we’ve had for 43 years.  I can pinpoint with certainty the exact month after which a general feeling of displacement settled like sticky dust all over me, my family, my classroom, my teachers, our closest friends, our home, our city… In the years and decades that followed, I never experienced another event that brought such a magnitude of change to the nucleus of life.   Not in Iran, and definitely not after a whole life lived outside of Iran.  Perhaps only recently, the experience of the Trump years and the Covid-19 pandemic, the significant fear, change and frustration that both events brought to our col
Post a Comment
Read more

On Donald Trump, Crunchy Bananas and our Children... A "How To" on keeping up Spirits and Sanity

The other morning at breakfast, my four year old looked, yet again somberly, at the breakfast before her.  Despite having enthusiastically selected a hodgepodge of liberally salted hard boiled egg whites on the side of toasted hamburger buns, strawberries and vanilla yogurt and a cup of milk, she still could not bring herself to enjoy her breakfast.  Her face was wrinkled, as was mine with exasperation from yet another failed attempt at assembling a palatable breakfast for my picky eater. This one, she is quite the philosopher.  And before I could ask her why she wasn't eating, she said: "Two Things!"  Holding up two tiny fingers.  "The smells of these foods I picked, don't go with each other! And I wish Donald Trump would magically become Hillary Clinton, and the word (world) would be GREAT again".     Despite our best efforts to protect our children from the anxiety of these times, they are alert and picking up on the mood (and the lingo) in the wor
1 comment
Read more

Safa

I have always loved words.  The way some people love shiny new objects.  As soon as I heard a new word, a word that captured my imagination, my energy, my hundreds of unnamed inner thoughts and feelings, I would latch on to it with fearceness, joy and curiosity.  I have also always been intrigued by how regular old words can be used in an unexpected context and evoke bursts of unexpected feelings in the listener, such as laughter, anticipation or tears.  I would search for those words coming out of the mouths of everyone around me, and mentally catalog them like a dutiful librarian, and await the opportunity to say the words with my own mouth out loud to an audience, or better yet use it in an essay where the teacher could grade it, get a kick out of it, or read it to the whole class.      As a child I always loved the Persian word Safa .   For one thing the word sounds so simple, yet sophisticated and beautiful, and for another, each of my memories of hearing this word is stored in th
2 comments
Read more