Happy Tuesday!!! Good to see all of your smiling faces again. I took a bit of a sabbatical from the blog for while. Although technically that means a rest from work and this really isn't work. Or did it start feeling that way?
Yesterday my daughter told me she needed my help. She needed help deciding what she's going to be when she grows up. I told her that she had plenty of time to figure that out and she should be in no hurry. Then we talked about her being an animal doctor, or working at a pet store (only if it doesn't have tarantulas of course). So a few hours later she took the question to my husband. He had a completely different answer than my "wait and see" approach. He told her that some people figure out what they want to be really early and not to let anyone stand in her way. I believe there was talk of a guinea pig farm for a bit. Watching this very sweet dialogue between father and daddy's girl made me think. What did I love doing when I was little that, at the time, didn't realize would turn out to be my passion later in life?
I could pick vegetables for hours when I visited my grandmother. I would dash to the garden of my great Aunt to see what new had sprung up that summer. I did have my favorites. Green beans were like hunting for treasure, the bigger the better. Corn was another of my favorites to pick. Two, of which, I do not have in my tiny backyard patio garden.
One Thanksgiving, and I'm certain my grandmother is shaking her head in agreement as she's reading this.. and she'd better be reading this, I picked all of the meat off the turkey after dinner. She still talks about that. I just couldn't see giving all of that delicious meat to the trash can. To this day, I threaten my poultry that I can strip it naked in 2 minutes flat.
I remember watching cooking shows at my babysitters house. The Louisiana Chef (I GARR-OHN-TEE), Julia Child, Graham Kerr (after he started the healthier cooking). Was it not normal for a 6 year old to watch cooking shows for hours on end? I would even settle for infomercials about food.
How can I pinpoint that thing in my kids and foster it? Who knows? But I do wonder if I had really, truly realized that being around food was my happy place, maybe I would be the next Iron Chef...or just maybe the next one Chopped? Either way, I'd be around those industrial stoves, stainless steel counters and giant whisks.
To try to get back to that "happy place" I took some time from my blog. I had recently become a twitterererer? tweeter? tweety bird? Whatever you call it, it put me in touch with hundreds of other food bloggers. As exciting as it was/is, it made me wonder..what do I have to offer that hasn't already been done? Well, I don't have the answer to that. But I do know that it doesn't always have to be what I made for dinner that night. So to quote some famous person that once said it (that's my version of a citation), "if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life". So, I will continue to mother, and wife and write on my blog and be a runner. Hopefully at the end of the day, we'll put the kids to bed, put our feet up, pour a glass of Merlot and have a really interesting, humorous, informative (good or bad) conversation about food.
And I wish someone had told me when I was younger that you can be/do more than one thing when you grow up. It would have taken the pressure off of the question that is so often asked by adults of children.
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