Liebe en die Küche

I've always believed that one can measure how well one is loved by the friends & family who gather in their kitchen... Some of my most favorite memories are associated with food & cooking, conversations across a table, holiday baking, morning coffee, particular aromas, bathing babies in a kitchen sink...

To this day, when I smell certain Thai dishes or spices, I am transported back to Kleinlangheim, Germany to my friend Pranee's Küche where we spent many an afternoon cooking spicy Thai food, eating jasmine rice with our hands, and exchanging military gossip... That was an entire decade ago & I'm sorry to say that we lost touch years ago, but there's not a week that goes by that I don't think of my dear friend as I eat Thai food quite often... although it's never as good as hers. =)

So about the Love in the kitchen... My kids love me a lot. Loads, in fact. So much so, that the Love was becoming a hindrance. Love was rummaging through the refrigerator, crawling around my feet, pulling on my pant legs, playing in the sink, digging in the pantry, throwing things into the trash that shouldn't be there, & other annoying things like licking my clothes & just sitting between my feet screaming & crying while I cook. Love also has recently developed a taste for potting soil. --Few things can be more relaxing I tell you. However, Kev & I decided that the time had indeed come to barricade Love from the kitchen.

About 5 minutes after installing the 100 bucks worth of baby gates, 9 month old Liam stands holding onto the bars of one gate like a little convict screaming furiously at the injustice of it all while Kevin & I enjoy our first moments of kitchen freedom from our little appendages. Unlike the angry convict, Bella on the other hand treats our new strategy with all the indifference of one of those remote control cars that have sensors that tell it when the path is obstructed & turns the other way... "OK fine," she seems to say, "I'll go tear up something somewhere else..." & thusly does. Although she seemed to find all the screaming racket a bit disturbing, since she's not the one doing the screaming of course, and therefore elected to retreat upstairs to her room to engage in her destruction.

OMG. One would think fire ants had been dumped down the baby's diaper! So not only was he banned from the kitchen & separated from his adoring parents, but now he was abandoned by his beloved big sister & suddenly alone in his very own personal prison. He was PISSED.

And we're alone in the kitchen!

Smiling to each other, we're thinking to ourselves, "Wow, this is great!" And then, Kevin watches as my jaw slowly drops & my gaze averts to somewhere behind him... He turns around, in slow motion I recall, just in time to see his screaming baby son scurry up the stairs & disappear behind the wall! --Climbing with the agility & ease of one who might have been born climbing stairs.

"Oh shit!"

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When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.
--Brian W. Aldiss