Spain Dad, a baby blog

Moo Cluck Chocolate Chip Cookies Baked by Veganbaking.net.

The buzzer rang. Alleke beat me to the front door, and while I picked up the phone and buzzed in our friends below at the entrance to our apartment building, Alleke pounded on the door and chanted, “Open, open, open.” I clicked open the door, and she escaped into the hallway, shivering with excitement.

Of course our friends had come to see the baby, Teo. They would not have been sitting on our couches on a Thursday afternoon otherwise. Still, Alleke was doing everything she could to entertain them. She asked me to toss her in the air like a trapeze artist, but when our friends were taking pictures with Teo instead of watching her, she disappeared in her room to regroup.

“Look at me,” Alleke said from her doorway in a yellow sundress with white polka dots and rainbow tights as she walked her invisible catwalk through our living room. Our friends said how cute she was, but Alleke still didn’t seem satisfied. Maybe she sensed their hearts were divided.

In a last ditch effort, Alleke asked me if she could hold her baby brother. As they say, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

I frowned and shook my head. “No,” I explained, “our friends are only here for a short visit, and we want to give them the chance to hold Teo too.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I had I said something wrong. Alleke crawled into my lap and buried her head in my chest. I held her in my arms and looked around the room for something that might make her feel special. I spotted a Ziploc bag full of chocolate chip cookies sitting on the kitchen counter. April had made them the day before Teo was born.

“I’ve got an idea,” I whispered in Alleke’s ear. “Follow me.”

She took my hand and followed me into the kitchen. She started to giggle when she saw me open the Ziploc bag and shake the cookies onto a plate.

“Do you think our friends might want a cookie?” I asked Alleke.

She nodded her head excitedly. I handed her the plate, and she turned and ran out of the kitchen. Just as I started to yell after her, “Alleke, don’t run with the cookies,” I watched her foot get tangled in a pile of laundry sitting in the doorway. She stumbled forward, broke free, and then dove head first for the floor. She landed on the floor with the plate in her hands in front of her like a football player diving for the end zone, but when the plate smacked the floor, the cookies sprung into the air like grasshoppers. Some fell to pieces when they hit the ground, and others rolled under the furniture.

Everyone was watching Alleke as she picked herself up off the ground and ran over and hid behind the television. It was the first time I had seen my daughter embarrassed of herself, and I hated it. It seemed unfair that she had to feel ashamed of herself for something as insignificant as dropping a plate of cookies when she was already dealing with so much this week. She was entirely unsure of who she was now that she had a little brother to compete with, and she was hoping that someone…anyone…would notice her as the little girl who had not changed. The little girl who used to get everyone’s attention.

Parents with two or more kids had told me that when we had our second we would discover that there’s always more love to give. You never run out of love, they said. They may be right that our capacity to love is infinite, but I say it’s still hard to pay attention to two kids at the same time.