Growing a Pumpkin Patch is Hard Work.: For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)

Adam was a little high-maintenance this week. High-maintenance, as in, waking up at 4:25 every morning and moaning, "Mommy, do you want to rock? Mommy, do you want to rock? Mommy, do you want to rock?" over and over and over again until finally, and despite the fact that I haven't wanted to rock - or do anything other than sleep - at 4:25 AM since 1996, one of us would go into his room and rock him in the glider and doze until about 6:00 AM, when Adam would exclaim, "Wake up! It's early time! I am ready for a waffle!"

When he didn't want to rock, he was kind of bossy, demanding, and whiny. It reminded me of when he was a few months old and an occasional bout of extreme fussiness and poor sleep usually meant that he was about to hit some big developmental milestone, like rolling over or dropping a feeding, and I figured that his behavior this week could only mean that he was about to do something huge, like tackle quantum physics.

Things came to a head a few days ago when I presented him with his dinner: potatoes mashed with collards, a slice of pizza (I try always give him something that I know he'll eat, and the collards seemed risky), and these really delicious black-eyed pea fritters. Those fritters were outrageously good - so tasty, in fact, that when Chris and I had some with our dinner the night before, we said to each other that if Adam (who has been a little picky about his food lately) didn't go for these, we would start to worry about his taste buds. Adam ate his pizza, poked at the potatoes ("They have green in them! I don't like green."), and when he got to the fritters, asked, "Mommy, what are those? Are those minis?" (Adam calls Chick-fil-A nuggets "minis," as in the restaurant's blessedly good wee little chicken biscuits.)

"They're kind of like minis, except they have black-eyed peas in them. They're very good - I think you'll like them."

Adam sneered and, sounding a lot like the Queen of Hearts, said, "Those look like dirty minis. Put them in the trash!"

He picked the fritters up off his plate and thrust them towards me. I ate them. They were delicious.

Things got better as the week progressed, and by this morning, he was back to his normal, funny, adorable self. We've been going swimming at the city pool every morning, and today he started a new Parent's Morning Out near our house, and he loved it:

"They have trucks there! I played with the trucks! They have two diggers, too, but one digger broke, but that was okay. When I need to go pee pee, I say, 'Teacher! I need to go pee pee!' and then we go to the little potty. And then I ate lunch. I ate PBJ and fruit leather. I like it!"

Comments

I'm with Adam--fruit leather rocks. (But, not the 4 AM kind of rock)
And, black eyed pea fritter recipe? Please?

Posted by: Jill | June 09, 2007 at 01:47 PM

Adam is discriminating about his fruit leather. He loves Trader Joe's brand fruit leather, but he barely tolerates Whole Foods 365 fruit leather - "It's too bumpy!" I'm a fn of fruit lether, too - it's the perfect post-swimming snack, the perfect keep-in-the-diaper-bag snack, and it's pretty guilt-free on my end.

Posted by: Teri | June 09, 2007 at 07:18 PM