Love -N- Stuff

In the hospital in rehab, Heidi had cooking lessons. Heidi enjoyed this part of therapy. So one day I was invited for breakfast. Heidi prepared orange juice, scrambled eggs, toast, and bacon. She did all of the preparing and serving of our breakfast while using a walker. 

“Mom, how am I doing?” she asked.

I quickly replied, “Very good. Now, who has to eat those eggs?” I asked. She giggled and replied, “You do!”

Heidi did not like eggs.

It was with mixed feelings that I watched her fix breakfast. I was so proud of each accomplishment, scared when she was clumsy, and afraid she would spill something.

Our breakfast was super. Love was the very special ingredient in this breakfast prepared by a daughter and a new, young wife.

Another day the therapist asked her what main dinner meat she would like to fix. She even suggested hamburgers. Heidi told her she wanted to fix Chicken Minnesota. The therapist was a little bit skeptical. She had never heard of such a recipe. Heidi laughed and told me, “They constantly check your brain to see if  you know what you are doing. I fooled her. I remembered the recipe and told her exactly what to buy, and how I would prepare it.”

Months later, when the holiday season came around, Heidi wanted to bake cookies. She and grandmother tried some of that frozen cookie dough which calls for the cook to slice and bake. But Heidi didn’t like the quality of the product. So I told her we could make a batch of chocolate chip cookies. When Bob brought her the next day, they had a bag of flour and tin of chocolate chips.

Our evening went like this: Heidi read the recipe. She diped the flour with the measuring cup. I leveled it off with a knife. I broke the eggs, and she dumped them in the bowl. When it came time to stir, I did the mixing. We tried several ways for her to dip the cookie dough on the cookie sheet. Finally, I dipped with a spoon, and she knocked the dough off with a rubber spatula onto the cookie sheet. I did the baking. When the cookie tray came out of the oven, I carried it to the table, and she carefully transferred the cookies to a plate to cool. It was hard for her, but we only had a couple broken ones to eat when we packed them in cookie tins. We had so much fun teasing each other over the recipe, who was going to sample the raw dough, how many broken ones we were going to have to eat that we didn’t have time to cry over what we couldn’t do. The house smelled of chocolate chip cookies and that alone makes one feel good all over. Was this another one of God’s little miracles?  “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine . . .” (Proverbs 17:22)