You think I’m kidding, right? Nope.
I stood in front of the thick wooden chopping block in our kitchen and began carving the mango in its skin into cubes and Edie decided she wanted to be close, so she toddled into the kitchen while Lucy and David sang songs in the living room and were waiting for breakfast. Today we had our Saturday Blue Plate Special - bacon, spinach, avocado and tomato sandwiches on toast, the make-your-own variety, with a little mango on the side.
She whimpered a little and had this pathetic, sad unattended-to look on her face, so I picked her up and held her in one arm while I steadied the mango on the cutting board by propping it up between two plates. I cut long deep lines down the mango with my one free hand and then, jiggled the knife around and jostled the baby a bit, so I could make the cuts crosswise.
It wasn’t pretty, mind you, but Edie was happy just to be in my arms and I wasn’t completely butchering the mango, although the cuts were jagged and the little chunks of yellow mango meat were battered a bit and some juice had puddled up under my fingers where I held the knife and dripped down onto the cutting board.
It all seemed to be going rather harmoniously, this one-armed thing, until Edie decided that sitting in my arms wasn’t enough and like a starved penguin diving for a mackerel, she all of a sudden dove for my boob and kind of bent over and popped my nipple in her mouth, which required that she bend down to meet it while pulling it upward to meet her mouth. Very tricky getting that nipple into your mouth from that position, but my children are...well, gifted.
I thought about abandoning the mango and just sitting down somewhere and breastfeeding her, but I was almost done and I only had a few more cuts to go and I really wanted to get breakfast on the table and really, Edie was probably eager to breastfeed because she was hungry, so I just soldiered on. I let Edie nurse while she was sitting on my one arm, but kind of bent over and down to reach my boob and sucking away and I kept cutting the mango one-handed and scraping the mutilated little cubes into a bowl as if I were a woman on a mission.
I got breakfast to the table...with my one free hand. BSAT was great - a wonderful Saturday breakfast. The kids love to make their own and pick and choose over the bacon and veg. And really, anything with bacon is heavenly. Mango looked kind of sad but it still went down just fine.
xxxooo Kim
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