Why ‘Baby Loves Butter’ ?

Lola and Felix. Felix and Lola. My kids. They are just the sweetest, most darling pains in the ass you will ever meet. I love them so. Lola will be twelve in September and Felix is two and a half.

Let’s just get take a moment before we move on to get something out of the way. My kids are nine and a half years apart. That’s a lot, I know. People want to know why. People want to know if they have different dads. People think it’s weird. So, to clear things up, here’s the info: My husband Robert is the father of both of these monster-angels. We were convinced for a very long time that we only wanted one kid. ‘We are too anxious,’ we thought, ‘one is a plenty, one is a lot, another child might kill us.’ Then some years went by and we thought, ‘maybe, just maybe’…and Felix seized the opportunity and jumped on board. It turns out that all our fears were well founded but we are still glad we had him. So that’s that, now you know.

I had another food blog, years ago, called Ivy’s Kitchen that fell by the wayside when we were distracted with building a house. If you are interested you can find it here. I thought about resurrecting it, but decided that I wanted a fresh start for a new phase of my life. Coming up with a name for it was ridiculously hard. I wanted something food related but not exclusively so. Baby Loves Butter was actually the first of about fifty contenders but it got pushed aside and forgotten about. I gave up on the idea of a blog altogether for a while due in part to lack of confidence and in part to lack of time/energy/sleep. Now, a year later, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and do it and Baby Loves Butter is the only name on my list that I still like.

Both of my children have had obsessions with butter. When Lola was very small, she knew the sound of the lid clinking on the butter dish so well that it would wake her from a sound sleep in another room. She’d wake up yelling for butter and nap time would be over. Felix has been known to just eat butter off a spoon for breakfast. In his parent-toddler preschool class this last year he was the kid climbing up on the counter to get to the honey butter that was set aside for snack time. And when snack time (finally) arrived and all the other children were peacefully eating their bread with a reasonable amount of butter on it, I was saying for the third time “Will you please pass us the honey butter, again,” while Fe melted down on his chair next to me.

The thing is, I really, really know how they feel. I want to eat spoonfuls of butter too. I want to suck the butter off my roll and cry for more. The clink of the butter dish, the rustle of the butter wrapper, the thunk of a pound of butter hitting the counter, these sounds are powerful. They are the sounds of good things to come.