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Why I Give My Kids Cake for Breakfast

Sometimes my kids will ask to have cake for breakfast.

Yesterday reminded me why I never say “no.”

My 6-year old daughter Selah was sitting in the front yard with our dog, and I took a couple of quick photos. When I scrolled back to look at them I thought to myself, “Oh my God, where did she go?”

Smiling back at me through the screen wasn’t the person I was expecting. This wasn’t my little baby girl. She looked different to me, as if in the snap of the shutter she’d been replaced by a noticeably older girl who resembled her.

Most of the time you don’t realize the rate at which your children are changing. That acute farsightedness is the tax on sharing daily life with them. But once in a while you get to see them with new eyes and it just steals the breath from you; how much is gone, how rapidly life is happening, the version of them that is now only a memory and a photograph.

People tell you constantly how quickly the time with your kids goes and you think you get it, until one day you see it through the viewfinder of your phone or across the room or looking back at you at dinner—and it just levels you.

That’s the thing about parenting. No one prepares you for how achingly bittersweet it is to watch your children grow-up; the way you both celebrate and mourn the changes in equal measure. They don’t tell you that you will rejoice greatly at the milestones and the growth spurts and the lost teeth, while simultaneously grieving what it means you have to say goodbye to.

No one tells you that you will want desperately to freeze time even while trying with all of your strength to get your children to the next step, the next grade, the next thing, the next day. You will be both propelling them forward and looking backward the whole time.

And this is why I let my kids have cake for breakfast.

Because they’re kids.
Because they ask.
Because cake for breakfast seems right and good and lovely.
Because the idea of having cake for breakfast may one day seem strangely inappropriate and reckless to them.
Because one day they will be proper adults with proper adult worries and proper adult problems.
Because that day will come far more quickly than I want it to.

And right now I want to savor every silly, nonsensical, impulsive second of this time with them, because I know how precious and fleeting these seconds are. I know that I can’t fully see the changes happening as they are happening. I know that one day soon I will look into my daughter’s eyes and so miss this version of her and wonder where that girl went so quickly.

Cake for breakfast? Sure!
Cookies in bed? Of course!
Pixie Stix on the way to the dentist? Why the heck not?!

Moms and Dads, go look at your children.
See them with new eyes.
Notice the changes.
Celebrate the new things.
Mourn what you have to say goodbye to.

And then, cut a couple of slices of cake for you and your kids—even if it is only 7AM.

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