Stitchpop

I'd like to propose that days of the week be given a different numbering system than weekends. If something is due on April 1 and I get it to you on April 4, for example, it's only one day late. But that's not how it looks on the status report.

This weekend I learned why I am not allowed to bake cakes.

Because I eat them.

I made the cake Friday because Matilda was starting to emerge from marathon puking, and as we were sitting there watching TV, she saw someone pulling a cake out of the oven. And Matilda said, "Cake sounds good!"

When your child has refused to eat or drink anything for three days, as a mother you start to get a little crazy. I pounced on it. "What kind of cake?" I asked. "Do you want icing? What kind of icing? And ice cream? With strawberries? And chocolate milk? And cookies?"

Matilda shrugged and settled back into her ketone-laced food indifference. I, however, now wanted cake almost as much as I wanted her to eat something.

There's something about having a big, fat, fluffy cake in a 9x12 pan sitting in your kitchen all weekend. No matter what you're doing, you're acutely aware of it. It beckons you in from working in the yard just to hack off a chunk of it and shove it in your mouth. It draws attention to itself when you're stacking dishes in the cabinet. You can even hear it calling over the roar of the vaccuum cleaner.

And it seems like no matter how much of the cake you eat, there's still about half the cake left in the pan.

"I had cake for breakfast," Gary confessed yesterday.

"So did I," I said. "And I'm also planning to have cake for lunch."

If it keeps up like this, we might be able to feed several impoverished nations with one cake.

There's a loaves and fishes parallel in here somewhere, but I'm not drawing any grand conclusions.