Sunday Morning Breakfast

Oh, the joys of the "mundane"

“Mommy!” I heard Ada cry out from our bedroom.

I looked up from the book I was reading, Runaway Horses by Yukio Mishima, and glanced at the clock. 6:42 AM.

“Dang,” I whispered to myself. “She’s up real early today.”

I made a mental note of where I was on the page and placed my bookmark snugly in the gutter of the book. It’s not that I didn’t want her to be up — I did — but it was an hour earlier than I was hoping, which… I mean… do I really need to explain to parents why their young child under-sleeping can create a problem?

Doolin, our cat, got up from her perch upon the bookshelf beside the window, stretched as cats do, and then gracefully jumped on top of the old, black piano shell turned art storage cabinet where she’d be safe from a well-meaning, yet rough and handsy three-and-a-half-year-old. A moment later, the door to our bedroom opened and out she came, the back of her hands firmly rubbing the sleep from her eyes as she adjusted to the natural light in the living room. I picked her up, as I always do, rocked her gently, and gave her some good morning kisses atop her head.

“What would you like to do, love?” I asked after a minute or two of rocking.

“Make breakfast,” she said with the scratchy morningtime voice of someone who hasn’t yet spoken.

“That sounds like a great idea. Wanna make those eggs and bacon on an English muffin we were talking about yesterday?”

“Yes,” she replied without hesitation. “I want to crack the eggs.”

Still half-asleep, she pushed her learning tower to the edge of the kitchen countertop and asked for me to grab the eggs from the fridge. I grabbed the eggs, butter, muffin tray, and bacon and placed them all on the counter in front of her.

“Start by buttering six of the cups in the muffin tray.”

“Why?”

“So that the eggs come out easily once they’re baked,” I responded as I turned the oven to 350° Fahrenheit. “If you don’t butter the tray, the eggs will stick.”

“Mmm,” she grunted in a way that I translated as her understanding the task.

She got to work in that adorable, clumsy way little kids do when they try so hard to be helpful, but can’t help but make a mess of whatever it is they’re doing. I’ve gotten better at just shutting up whenever she runs into an obstacle or makes a mess. So long as she’s not intentionally destroying whatever she’s working on, I’ll keep quiet and help her only when she asks for it.

She dug her two thumbs into a small crack in the first egg. One thumb had yesterday’s Grogu-themed Band-Aid on it still. We’re in a stage where every bump needs a Band-Aid. A few days earlier, she went to bed with two shark-themed Band-Aids across her face, which couldn’t have been comfortable, but were, apparently, necessary.

It wasn’t her best crack of an egg, put it that way. Thankfully, it was only improvement from there with minimal egg shells ending up in the cups of the tray.

I won’t bore you with the details of the rest of our breakfast making adventure, other than to say that it was a slow process that she eventually lost interest in about halfway through. She decided it was more fun to work on some French language activity book her little friend brought her home from a recent trip to La Belle Province.

She did her thing and I did mine. Mum remained asleep, as is customary on Sundays.

A short time later, our Sunday morning masterpiece was finished and it wasn’t half bad for a first try. In excitement, Ada joined me once more to pour honey atop her sandwich and when I asked her to go wake up her mother, at the top of her lungs she screamed, “MOM! BREAKFAST.”

“I meant go into the bedroom and tell her quietly,” I said with ringing ears.

“Mmm,” she grunted again as if to say that she knew exactly what I meant but chose to yell anyway. A lot can be communicated through grunts.

Ada took one mouse-sized bite of her sandwich before ripping the entire thing apart so she could eat the eggs, bacon, and English muffin individually. She does this every time. I don’t fight it.

“Just make sure you eat all of it, OK?”

“Bacon!” She squealed before ripping a chunk off with her mouth. “Mmm, fatty.” Yet another grunt with an entirely different meaning from the previous two. This kid loves the fatty bits of meat, you gotta see her tear into a T-bone steak.

Not long after our last bite, I finished my coffee, shaved, and had a quick shower before heading for the 9 AM service at my church. I share this Sunday morning with you not because anything extraordinary happened, but because of how ordinary of a Sunday it was… For our family, at least. I love what others might call mundane. I think of all the things this world needs, a little girl getting to wake up on a Sunday to make breakfast with her dad is up there with more obviously important things in life like fresh air, a functioning power grid, and clean water. Sure, I’m biased. But that doesn’t make me wrong. Does it?

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