Fist Full of Cream Cheese

Today was a mostly shitty day. It was gray, rainy, and cold —and our heat wasn’t working right.  I could barely get the little guy out of bed to get him to pre-K in time - although he did manage to provoke his big sister enough at breakfast that she shoved him hard enough to make him cry. 

When I got home from school drop-off, it took me five tries to be able to log in to work - first the internet and then my card reader refused to cooperate.  

For most of the day, the bigger kid and I were stuck at home with just a space heater and the dog to keep us company. The glitchy internet was making her grumpy. She fell off her drum stool and hurt herself twice. Oh yeah -she’s been sitting on a drum stool to do her school work because her ADHD requires something that either spins or bounces.

My husband got home in the late afternoon, just as she was finishing up school. While I was doing the Friday homework check, he went down to the icy basement to see if he could fix the furnace. (He did, at least temporarily!) 

After that, I was working and the kid was in the other room, or so I thought. My husband came upstairs, and I hear this exchange:

“What are you eating?”

“Nothing.”

“What’s on your face?”

“Nothing.”

“Is that...a fist full of cream cheese?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

This kid waited for us to stop paying attention and then decided to stick her filthy eight-year-old hand in the tub of cream cheese for a snack. Oh! But wait! Apparently it’s not the only time, because the cream cheese has been mysteriously disappearing for the past few weeks.

She was pouty the rest of the day -and every time my husband and I look at each other, we start laughing and making jokes about fists full of cream cheese. 

When I went to tuck the kid in, she told me never to talk about it again. Whatever. Like I’m not going to tell her future husband this story. In fact, right now I am fully hoping that, when I’m old(er) and on my deathbed, I grab her hand, look in to her eyes, and faintly whisper, “fist full of cream cheese,” before I finally and blissfully croak.