Pumpkin Roll Cake

This pumpkin roll cake is the most delicious thing I have made in a long time.

It is beautifully imperfect. The sponge cake is has more moisture than is typical, and so the process of rolling is a bit more finicky. It cracked for me, and I think it will every time. But cracks, in my opinion, are part of the charm of rolled cakes. It would be a great Halloween treat or a delicious departure from pie for Thanksgiving.

Life has been a bit messy lately. Both my kids are in part-time preschool/daycare now, and they’re alternating getting sick on a weekly basis. There hasn’t been a week since August that I haven’t felt like I was coming down with something.

I was also pregnant again for a spell. I guess it wasn’t meant to be. It wasn’t planned. But the loss of the sweet little spark that was with me for such a short period of time has been sitting really heavy with me. It’s been a month since it happened and I haven’t fully recovered. I still get teary when I think of it, and my first-trimester fatigue hasn’t fully disappeared.

The silver lining is that I feel I was given another chance to be a better mom to my little guy, Everett, who just turned two and with whom I’ve spent almost no one-on-one time. I’ve just switched Theo to morning school, instead of afternoons while Everett is napping. In those quiet, early hours, I’ve really gotten to know this sweet, smart, passionate little human, and I’ve hugged him a hundred times a day in the past four weeks.

He’s spirited (exhausting?), and perpetually in trouble. In spending time with him undistracted by a chatty big brother, I’ve gotten to understand his motivations.

 

The relentless, burning curiousity that drives him to do things like fill his play kitchen sink with toilet water and snap my four-hundred-dollar retainer in two. The fine motor skills that haven’t caught up with his quick thought processes, combined with the short temper he undoubtedly acquired from me, that leads him to destroy his train tracks when he can’t get one piece to stick with the next. The biting that needs a nap. The kicking that needs a hug.

 

I’m thankful for the conscious slowing down, even if the circumstances triggering it were sad ones. It’s made our relationship less struggle and more snuggle.

Real life is messy and imperfect.  Like this cracked pumpkin cake coated in sugar. Have a beautiful week, friends.