On the Fourth of July, my daughter was not yet five and a half weeks old. As I expected (yet not fully accepted), not much was getting done besides my one and only priority: keeping her alive. While that may sound dramatic, it’s true. I remember my grandma telling me that a first birthday party is not for the baby – rather, it’s for the parents to celebrate the accomplishment of keeping their baby alive for the first year.
We were still very much in first-time parent survival mode then (and still are now). So you can probably imagine my husband’s reaction when I told him, quite proudly, that I was going to make a cherry pie with the cherries he had just bought from the store. I had recently seen one in a marketing email from our favorite local bakery. Their beautiful, professionally crafted cherry pie was the image of summer. It had a golden brown lattice laid perfectly atop ruby red cherries, and was sprinkled with extra large sugar crystals. Exquisite. Inspiring. Enough to get me to say “I think I’ll try making my own!”
He knew this energy of mine. He had gone back to work already, but with today off, we had two sets of hands to care for our new baby. I was desperate to jump on the opportunity to go above and beyond for our little family. Before I could get very far, my husband lovingly reminded me that I hadn’t finished our little one’s birth story that I intended to write, another big task that I hadn’t (and haven’t yet) finished. Instead of running around, going to the store, buying all the ingredients we didn’t have in the house, and then spending hours in the kitchen baking a pie, I could just eat the cherries and write the birth story if I felt like being productive in honor of our family. Huh. Why didn’t I think of that? Also, did I fail to mention I don’t like warm fruit? This includes cherry pie.
I was simply after the image of perfection. When in reality, there is perfection in the simple.
Today, my cherry pie was going to the farmers market. My daughter is eight weeks old, and I was hoping we could make it to the farmers market that’s on Tuesday mornings – something I won’t be able to do when I go back to work in a few weeks. As with any newborn, we are not on a schedule. We are, however, fortunate enough at least to have a routine (though not tied to any specific times of day). I was hoping that we would make it to the farmers market before it closed at noon. By 10:30AM, I realized my fate. Between feeding and pumping and changing diapers over and over again, I still hadn’t showered. I decided that instead of going to the farmers market, I would put my effort toward first figuring out how to shower and still watch my baby. While still a difficult task, this was clearly more of the “low hanging fruit”.
I’ll be honest, this blog is a bit of cherry pie. A seemingly frivolous, daunting task, and a bit of a distraction from other necessary work (i.e. making dinner, which I’m currently putting off). I know though, if I keep up with it, it will become a masterpiece and something that I’ll be proud of one day. For now, I think I’ll just eat the cherries. 🍒
The Lavender Locket 