​The kids are all very far behind in speaking, from what every other mother tells me their two-year-old is saying. But the kids are picking up new words quickly. At least one per day. We are at the difficult stage where they try to say a lot of things, and I have no idea what it is they want to convey, and we all get frustrated. One will say, for example, “Baw, baw, baw,” and I can’t figure out for the life of me what it means in that particular context. 

​Cooking and I are not good friends. But I’ve tried to not ruin my children’s enjoyment of cooking (or eating, considering the many failures I’ve tried to make them eat). I knew they had the potential to make a party of cooking one day when they were two. They had a Betty Crocker mini-set of kitchen appliances which kept them concocting dishes long before it was safe for them to use real appliances. It included a toaster that really popped fake toast, a blender that when you pressed the button whizzed around whatever little toy you could fit into the pitcher, and a hand mixer that spun the beaters back and forth with every push of the sprocket-driven button. I knew they were ready to have their first cooking lesson when I came back into the bathroom one day when we were potty training and they had the hand mixer in the little bowls of the potty chairs and were whipping up what they’d put in there. (And it wasn’t water from the faucet.)
 
Our first cooking lesson: You don’t cook in the bathroom. And certainly not with what you find in the potty.

We moms (and mums) sometimes have bad days when we know we just screwed up royally and surely added another six months to our children's future and inevitable therapy sessions. I call them "Bad Mumdays."