You know you’re not a very confident baker when you’re adding up how much time it will take you to make your son’s birthday cake from scratch and you’re leaving enough time so you can make the back-up box cake mix if your first cake fails and also leaving enough time to run to the store for a bakery cake if it all goes downhill fast.
I don’t love baking. I think it has to do with my desire for instant gratification. I like to cook because I can see the hamburger browning right before my eyes. Baking requires perfect measurements, a multi-step process, and then after you’ve done all that work you have to put the thing in the oven for 30 minutes before you can eat it? No thanks.
I’ve seen that my pull towards instant gratification is evident in my three year-old Danny, too. I told my boys I would give them each a penny if they unloaded the silverware from the dishwasher. They are still blessedly at the age where a penny seems like a lot of money. While I cleaned up lunch Josh put the silverware away while Danny just went straight to my wallet and got himself a penny. You’ve got to admire his problem-solving skills even if he did inherit his mother’s distaste for delayed gratification.
You see, I find my cakes from scratch taste so good not because they turn out great, but because I can almost taste all the hard work that went into getting it just right. And isn’t that like our mothering? If I expect my child to hear me say, “Stay in the bed” and just obey, I may be disappointed. But what a sweetness there is when I’ve been consistent and faithful to enforce the rules and I finally have a child who puts himself in bed and stays there. Parenting sure isn’t about instant gratification even from the start, whether you endured nine months of pregnancy or a two year adoption wait.