A Nostalgic Meal

As I sit and ponder my day today and all that I accomplished, I’m thinking of the meal I prepared with my daughter for dinner. We spent about 4 hours making chicken and dumplings from scratch. It’s not normally my favorite thing to do, although it is one of my favorite meals. However today I really enjoyed it. As I sat there teaching my daughter about kneading dough and getting it to the right consistency for rolling, I remembered doing the same thing with my own mother at around her age. For our family, this meal was usually made about once a year for my grandfather’s birthday (lovingly referred to as Pop Pop).  It’s not a difficult meal to make necessarily, but it is time consuming. Today, smelling the aroma of the chicken cooking and the broth, it took me back to those times. Sometimes as children, teens, and young adults, we swear to never be like our parents. This may be true for some, even a good thing for others. However, for me personally, the older I get the more I realize there are things that I’d love to do or be just like my mother. To be blessed enough to have a daughter who loves being in the kitchen with me and hangs on my every word as I explain to her my baking and cooking, is something I may sometimes take for granted. My days are very busy as a homeschooling mother of three and trying to do some baking on the side. Sometimes I easily miss the important moments just because of life and being so busy.  Things need to be done and taken care of, but it’s also equally important to stop and enjoy life for a few minutes.  You parents out there know how fast time flies when you have children. Standing there with my daughter at the counter, kneading dough and rolling it out with her made me so grateful to be able to give her the same experience I had with my mother.  I can always stick the family recipe on a piece of paper and pass it along to her when she gets older, yes, but the experience of her physically being able to make the meal with me is something that she’s going to remember, possibly even as she gets older and may have a daughter of her own. When the meal was all said and done and we got to enjoy it, it tasted just as I remembered as a child, only better this time because I made it with my own child. Maybe you, too, could take some time out in the next couple of days to enjoy a few moments. Live life. Make a memory. Savor it.