‘Wait, what? Maybe I fished the wrong child off the square?’

It’s a phase, it’s a phase, it’s a phase… If you repeat the mantra often enough, you’ll just be talking to yourself in frustration. Because, really help? It doesn’t, especially during a jump.

Jump

I don’t know who introduced that word, but they certainly don’t have children. Or is it a bit sadistic, of course that is also possible. Diminutives, in my opinion, suggest something nice. Think: wine, terrace, trip. Say, the average description of someone with a far too rosy profile on a dating site. And if ‘something nice’ is too ambitious, then it is at least something short-lived. An hour, a difficult day, a sleepless week – at most.

Ditto for it crying hour. At an hour, I think of 60 minutes of discomfort and not of an evening-filling program in which my baby demonstrates to me, my friend and the neighbors how many decibels she can already reach.

Genius baby

Sure, those babies have a lot to process mentally. Learn more in such a first year than during the rest of their lives. Yet. Jackie’s sleep-is-for-losers leap has been going on for so long now that I expect our child to be so brilliant by now that her first word will be in fluent Mandarin.

“I expect Jackie to be so brilliant by now that her first word will be in fluent Mandarin”

Tomato gate

Anyway, at least you get a notification of a jump (The Oops, I’m growing!app is just the Rain radar of my child), you can’t say that about a phase. It comes suddenly and can last for years. Take Norah’s I hate tomatoes phase. Overnight tomato here was the Voldemort of vegetables, The He Who Must Not Be Named, let alone bought or eaten. Pretty clumsy as you signature dish packed with tomatoes. Not that I’m much of a Jamie Oliver; something quickly becomes a specialty if you can make quite little else.

This week I suddenly hear from the kitchen: ‘Yippee, tomato!’ and a sound appropriate to enthusiastic rummaging in the container of cherry tomatoes. Wait, what? Did I perhaps fish the wrong child off the schoolyard? But no, it really is my tomato-hating toddler who is radiantly chewing on a cherry tomato.

Relief, joy, but also a touch of despair pass in review. Will this day go down in the books as the moment Norah became an easy (er) eater? But also: have I been scraping tiny red bits off the penne all those years before Jan Lul?

Wait, what?

That evening I immediately decide to make my famous pasta. With Andrea Bocelli as a cooking soundtrack in my head, I park Noor in front of the television while cooking. “Peppa?” I ask, but Norah shakes her head theatrically. “Nope, none Peppa. I don’t like that anymore. Booba!”