Today we are having a sick day – Stella and I. Maybe it was the persistent smokers hack she has developed, or the fact that her nose is running like a rocky mountain stream of snot, or the fact that she hasn’t eaten more than three and a half bites of food in the last 36 hours, but my finely tuned maternal instincts honed right in on her needs and here we are.

When she is sick it is a strange juxtaposition of feelings because I don’t ever, Ever, EVER want her to have to suffer like this but oddly, the change in her demeanor – to sweet and helpless – causes me to briefly consider keeping her in this incapacitated state forever. Her ability to be this cuddly and needy is a brief glimpse into how the other people live. This morning she clung to me like a baby koala and it couldn’t have been anymore endearing.

Being that she currently refuses to eat more than 1 bite of anything offered to her, I thought I could sway her into consuming a larger quantity if we made it a project-based event. A quick scan of the kitchen, and I decided we had all the ingredients to make banana-nut muffins. She seemed on board with it, so we hauled her box of Kleenex into the kitchen and managed to make one of the largest messes on record. She repeatedly coughed and sneezed directly into the batter, insisted that she (with the accuracy and precision of, well, a two year old) get to stir the ingredients, and demanded that part of the recipe required that we fill two of the paper muffin cups with chopped pecans. From an outsider’s perspective, it pretty much looked like we had stood across the room and thrown the ingredients at the bowl. We somehow managed to get the batter into the cups and the whole mess went into the oven for 20 minutes – basically, just long enough to lose the momentum of what the whole event was supposed to be about: getting her to eat. By the time the muffins were out of the oven and ready to consume, she feigned interest long enough for me to get her to eat roughly a bite and a half.

Up next, getting her to sleep somewhere besides on my person.