My first Mother's Day is rapidly approaching, and I'm so excited I could freaking burst. Chris, you'd better not forget what Sunday is. You'd better bring me the Egg McMuffin in bed that I've already requested and perhaps plan a whole bunch of other things celebrating how amazing of a mother I am, since Andy is incapable of formulating his feelings or a comprehensive plan that includes taking me to my favorite place (The Patio) and presenting me with a gift basket filled with a bag of my favorite nuts (pistachios).

I couldn't have done it without you, Andrew... that will be the first line of my acceptance speech come this Mother's Weekend (see how I already stretched it from a day to a full weekend?) as I receive the plaque declaring it is I who have won the coveted Mother Of The Planet award... anyway.

So, my dear Andy, I wanted to share something with you today. You've been rocking out the finger food lately (day care has started giving you a "real people food" lunch each day that I find increasingly hilarious given the fact that you're still, in fact, a baby: chicken nuggets and corn, ravioli and peaches, ham and cheese sandwich, the uber-mysterious riblet, fish sticks and cheese.) At home, I am much less adventurous with my offerings. I feed you mostly cereal pieces, shredded cheese, and bananas in addition to the panic-room amount of baby food purees I have on hand. Which brings me to what I wanted to share with you.

Every time I see you eat the cereal, I get a little choked up. It reminds me of something which in turn reminds me of something else. The former is a girl in my first grade class who brought dry cereal to school in a baggy for lunch. She was the new girl, and her family had just moved to Midlothian, Illinois, USA from... somewhere. Poland, I want to say. She did not seem to know any English, and she was always alone. None of the other kids (myself included) talked to her or played with her. And, during lunch, she used to eat her cereal and sob. I was six, and I thought maybe she was crying because she had to eat Cheerios for lunch- without milk- while the rest of us had sandwiches and chips. And, then, after a while, I got it. She was sad. She was alone, she was a little girl, and she was just plain sad. She probably hated it there in Midlothian, Illinois, USA, probably missed her friends, probably hated that she couldn't talk to anyone... the cereal had nothing to do with it, but now whenever I see anyone eating dry cereal- you included, Andy- that's what I think of. Her.

And whenever I think of her, I think of my dad. They are one and the same in the dry cereal neuron spark, and that's because I know my dad- your grandpa- was once some version of that little girl. A six year old from Italy in Blue Island, Illinois, USA who didn't know a word of English and endured that same sad hell as my first grade classmate. Only it was worse, probably because while a little girl immigrant is just someone to ignore, a little boy immigrant incites a sort of bullyish rage among the other kids. My dad got pushed around quite a bit as the little Italian kid. And perhaps this story strikes me, at times, as a bit too convenient of an ending, but my dad states that the first sentence of English he understood was one of the boys saying, "Just leave him alone," while the other kids picked on him, shoved him around. So there was one good apple in the bunch- but, regardless, it makes me a little teary-eyed to imagine my dad being the new, strange kid without any friends- regardless of whether or not my grandmother sent him to school with a baggy of dry cereal.

And that's what I think of when I see you palm your cereal and carefully move the pieces from your high chair tray into your sweet little mouth. How painful it can be to be a small kid, sometimes. How our parents move to new countries or something less drastic but equally dramatic that make us into those children who cry at their desk or get picked on by the boys. But how it all ends up okay, too. Grandpa is fine. He's a good man with a family and friends. And I'm sure dry cereal girl is fine, too. She's probably married with a family and a good career and has had a great life that got increasingly better after the end of first grade. In fact, I probably remember her dried cereal bags more than she does.